SWEATSHOPS: FINALLY, AIRING THE DIRTY LINEN

摘要

For more than a decade, consumer-product and retail companies have been fending off sweatshop critics by hiring auditors to inspect their overseas factories for labor violations. The companies use the reports to reassure consumers that they're grappling with the sweatshop conditions prevalent in low-wage countries. But the entire effort has been of limited public-relations value. For one thing, companies such as Nike, Wal-Mart Stores, and Walt Disney have largely refused to release the audits to the public. Essentially, they have asked critics to trust that they're taking care of the problem―which of course few are willing to do. Now, a handful of companies―among them Nike, Reebok, and Phillips-Van Heusen―have for the first time gone public. Their factory labor audits were posted in early June on the Web site of the Fair Labor Assn., a sweatshop-monitoring group started in 1997 with help from the Clinton Administration (table). (Nike Inc. released only limited information, citing its pending U. S. Supreme Court case.)