Should social auditors investigate on suicide?

Your Corporate Social responsibility Partner

We at WethicA encountered a very difficult problem recently: not a technical one, but an ethical one. Auditing is often a solo job where important decisions must be made immediately.

Employee suicide in China factories is often in the headlines and May this year seemed particularly affected. Many workers kill themselves or attempted to in the past months at Foxconn. Chinese media and Western media have both reported on the situation, so we won't repeat it here.

A few weeks ago, before the beginning of the Foxconn suicides, one of our auditors called me in the middle of the day and asked: “A female worker committed suicide in the factory two days ago. Should I investigate?” At that point, we have to make an immediate decision. Although the ethical consequences are strong and interesting information could have been gathered, we concluded it was best not to investigate. There are reasons on several levels.

From an individual standpoint, the emotional stress in the factory was still fresh and intense. Employees, the management team and the victim all deserve our compassion and discretion. Moreover, we are not experts or trained to handle such situations, and our lack of expertise could create more harm than good. In the end, we stayed informed about the suicide and remained neutral about the situation.

Let's review the ethical aspects of the audit now. Our primary responsibility is to audit factories on behalf of our customers. This customer is also in most cases a customer of the factory. The relationship or business agreement between the customer and the factory is open and mutual. Both the factory and the customer have decided to start this relationship and both have the power to terminate it. The audit content has to stay within the boundaries of the business agreement. This, however, does not mean the relationship is balanced or equal. The customer requires full transparency, which means the auditor will have to investigate in the factory to detect what may be hidden to ultimately allow the customer to make better-informed decisions. Admittedly transparency is not always granted. The auditor has to uncover the real situation with often only partial cooperation from the factory. Here the auditor may risk jeopardizing the necessary balance in the customer/factory relationship by acting like a policeman. The auditor should persuade the factory to cooperate and not force it. This way, the auditor can be more effective in pointing out inconsistencies and persuade the factory to be more transparent for its own benefit. As such issues in factories require delicate handling, auditors need know where to draw the line and to stop the investigation.

One case we had was regarding child labor where one child was said to be the son of one of the factory managers, but it was obvious he lived with other workers, making his supposed relation to the manager very suspicious. Since the factory refused to cooperate, we knew it was pointless to ask for a birth certificate.

Suicides bring us to this kind of limitation, where it would be considered overstepping the boundaries. Though suicides exist in that grey area where they could be linked with working conditions or they could not. But we do have other ways to assess the working conditions without getting involved and remaining neutral about this particular issue.

If a factory like Foxconn specifically requested to review the likely impact of working conditions on suicides in a factory, then the ethical dilemma will be an entirely different one.

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Release date: 2010-06-17

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