Health and Safety in Factories Top List of Labor Standards Violations

by James Parks, Dec 21, 2007

Already this holiday season, we’ve learned how sweatshop labor has gone into creating holiday ornaments sold by Wal-Mart and crucifixes made for U.S. churches.

Now, a year-end report by the Fair Labor Association (FLA) found 2,511 violations of the organization’s labor standards in factories around the globe, and nearly half (46 percent) were health and safety-related.

The Fair Labor Association: 2007 Annual Report provides information on unannounced factory inspections conducted in 2006 by independent auditors on the labor compliance programs of 38 companies affiliated with the association, and covers 147 factories and more than 110,000 workers. The FLA also found that 17 percent of violations pertained to wage and benefit standards.

According to the association, more than one-third of the factories inspected by FLA-accredited auditors were in China. Here are some of the examples of the violations the FLA found in China:

• In a hat factory in the province of Zhejiang, FLA inspectors discovered employees were working up to four hours of overtime per day, exceeding the legal limits established by Chinese labor law. Working with the FLA and the factory, the company that sources from this factory developed a plan ensuring that workers have one day off per week and work fewer hours on weekends.

• In Xiamin, an FLA inspection at an apparel factory found that even though the local minimum wage had increased two months earlier, the factory was still calculating workers’ base wages and overtime based on the lower figure. The company developed and put in place a plan to pay the legal wage and provide back pay to workers who had been underpaid.

To become an FLA affiliate, a company is required to comply with FLA’s Workplace Code of Conduct, which bans forced labor, child labor, harassment, abuse and discrimination. The code also requires companies to promote health and safety, respect freedom of association and collective bargaining, pay wages and benefits and appropriate compensation for overtime, FLA said.

When a factory is found that is not complying with the standards, the company must work with the FLA to develop an action plan to correct the problem. Click here to download the report (PDF).

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article |Comments (1)