Corporations are paying for worker abuse audits that are ‘designed to fail’, say insiders
Corporations are paying for worker abuse audits that are ‘designed to fail’, say insiders
US and UK companies with foreign operations use audits to prevent worker abuse – but auditors say the checks aren’t working
That headline does not read right.
If you fail an audit, that's a bad thing.
45Yeah, I get what they mean but it doesn’t work as written. They mean that it is “designed to fail as a measure to protect workers“
36"Designed to be ineffective"
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US and UK companies with foreign operations use audits to prevent worker abuse – but auditors say the checks aren’t working
I think they mean that they fail to accomplish their goal. But you’re not wrong in that it’s poorly worded.
15And how can you fail at worker abuse? it's the easiest thing, everybody's doing it.
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The solution is obvious. Hire an auditing firm to audit the auditing firms.
Bonus points if the auditing firm, hired to audit, subcontracts the auditing to the firm they are supposed to audit.
18And if they outsource the auditing to an India based auditing firm
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
When Ahmed scrutinized the attendance and pay records the company provided him, he found they had been falsified, in part because security footage showed the man was truly enduring a grueling schedule.
In interviews with the reporting partnership, nearly 100 workers describe an array of unfair and repressive labor practices within the Persian Gulf footprints of Amazon, McDonald’s, Chuck E Cheese and the InterContinental Hotels Group.
Dozens of firms perform hundreds of thousands of audits each year of labor, environmental and safety practices for many Fortune 500 companies and a host of smaller corporations.
“A vast majority of the social audit industry is so opaque that it doesn’t build trust with workers and their representatives and the lack of transparency is also fertile ground for the worst malpractices to thrive unchecked,” says Kashyap.
After interviewing 20 former and current auditors and dozens of industry experts, Kashyap concluded that auditing companies often don’t operate independently or transparently, acting more frequently as a way for brands to burnish their image than to keep workers safe.
“It is scandalous how much power has been afforded to multinational corporations, American brands, to dictate the terms of their own complicity because they have lawyers to say they checked all the boxes and are human trafficking compliant,” says Elena Shih, an assistant professor at Brown University and the author of Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue.
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