Operating a Profitable Compliance Business

by admin Posted on October 10, 2013

A middle rank bureaucrat goes to a factory manager to demand a bribe.

Bureaucrat: Give me money or I will ensure you fail your next compliance inspection.

Factory owner:  I paid your people yesterday to ensure that I would pass the next surprise compliance inspection scheduled for next Tuesday at 11:00 PM.  Surely they gave you your share.  Why should I pay twice?

Bureaucrat: I retire at the end of the year and I am collecting for my retirement fund.

Factory owner:  What do I care about your retirement fund?   “I pay your people once a month and once is enough.

Bureaucrat:  I do not have time to argue.  I have to visit 70 factories this week.  If you do not pay, my team will arrive tomorrow; find 100 deficiencies and close you down.

Factory owner:  How much and will take a check?

Today compliance has little to do with workers’ rights or working conditions.  Compliance is a business, and business has never been better.

For a relatively small sum, factories are informed in advance the dates for unscheduled compliance audits to ensure no child labor, no contract labour and that everything is a-ok.  For a slightly larger sum, bars on the windows, doors chained shut, and sewers working past midnight become invisible to the inspectors

To increase More...

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Bangladesh and The Failure of Compliance

by admin Posted on September 26, 2013

To work in Bangladesh is to come into contact with a disease with a 100% infection rate, where the first symptom is to be transmogrified instantaneously from the righteous among the gentiles to the scum of the earth.  No one is immune. Suppliers’ or customers’ vows to improve working conditions lead immediately to global disbelief. When Government or BGMEA, the local garment association, enacts legislation or institutes policies to raise their garment export industry to higher level of compliance, professionals and specialists criticize, and which when moved academic argot to English translate as Liar Liar pants on fire.

The difficulty is that the problem is not Bangladesh.  That country is but the most egregious example of a fundamentally flawed and corrupted system.

If we truly hope to avoid a repetition of recent events in Bangladesh, and to avoid repeating the horrific events of Bangladesh elsewhere, we in the industry must scrap the current system of compliance and permit another to take its place.

As a first step, we must stop lying to ourselves and to the rest of the world.  We must accept that compliance is not an exercise in customer public relations.

We begin with the customers because much of the problem lies with customers that over 20 years ago voluntarily assumed responsibility to ensure that their suppliers were in compliance.

  • The customers invented compliance
  • The customers More...

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The 2013 Name The New China Contest

by admin Posted on August 12, 2013

Once again garment sourcing professionals are gathering for their annual contest, “Name the New China.”

This year we have more entries than ever before; although, I regret to say that absent from the 2013 list of potential new-Chinas are both Svalsbard and Spizbergen.

I am also disappointed that yet again Atlantis has been omitted from the list.  Once again, I have complained to the committee and once again I have been rebuffed, with the excuse that only WTO members can be nominated to be the 2013 new- China. I am concerned that the failure to include Atlantis may prejudice development of their nascent garment export industry. I am reliably informed that Li & Fung has already delayed opening their Atlantis office and is now concentrating their efforts at the new frontier — the plant Neptune ­— where an unusually high cost of logistics can be offset by low labour rates, which they tell me compares favorably with planet Bangladesh, to say nothing of Neptune’s more salubrious environment.

Having made my complaints public, it is time for me to cast my vote for the 2013 Name the New China contest. I vote for China.  Yes, I believe than once again, China will be the new China.  To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of China’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

The above notwithstanding, Bangladesh is clearly everybody’s 2013 favorite.  There is something to be said for this.  In More...

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Posted in Bangladesh, Bangladesh, China-Greater China, Factory Strategies, Garment Factories, Garment Factories | Tagged , | 2 Comments