The article in the url link below reports on GAP’s response to a piece of investigative journalism in October by the UK newspaper The Observer that uncovered evidence of under-age children making GAP clothes (Issues: Auditing CSR, p94; Cultural Conflict, p160). The story is interesting on two levels. First, the speed and extent of GAP’s response, which seems to me to be genuine:
“Gap said it would refine its procedures to ensure that items made in textile workshops in India were not being produced by children. It also announced a grant of $200,000 to improve working conditions and said it would hold an international conference next year to come up with solutions for issues related to child labor. … the children who were found to be embroidering decorations on blouses for toddlers for Gap would be paid until they were of working age and then offered employment.”
Second, the extent to which GAP could have (or should have) been expected to avoid this problem:
“… the vendor that got the Gap order for the children's clothes had employed a rural community center to do the embroidery work but that this entity had subcontracted the work to a Delhi workshop where children were employed. While auditing in factories is relatively straightforward, checking conditions in the informal workshops where hand embroidery is done is harder because large contracts are often divided up among dozens of small workshops.”
It is one thing for a firm to be held responsible for the business practices of an immediate supplier. It seems to be another thing altogether to expect GAP to know about a sub-contractor (“a rural community center”) that had again contracted out this order to a Delhi factory—three steps removed from the initial order by GAP. The extent to which a firm is responsible for the actions of its suppliers throughout its supply chain (as well as how that responsibility should be enforced) is an issue on which a consensus within the CSR community is yet to arise.
Take care
Dave
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther/
Gap Vows To Combat Child Labor At Suppliers
By AMELIA GENTLEMAN
557 words
16 November 2007
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
6
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/business/worldbusiness/16gap.html
