All Resources

Chan Kam Hong

Occupational Injuries and Deaths

Ed Shepherd

Westerners use the term 'as mad as a hatter' to describe someone who is eccentric. The saying is based on a character called the Mad Hatter in Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth century fantasy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Multinational Monitor

The Dabindu Collective

Sri Lanka has a population of over 19 million that consists of Sinhalese, the majority ethnic group, and Tamils and Muslims as minority groups. Over 50 percent of the population and the labour force of 6.6 million are women.

Abdullah Siddiqui

Monina Wong

Conversation with EPZ Exchange Workshop participants from Honduras and El Salvador

Investment

In El Salvador less than 50 percent of the capital investment is local investment. 30 percent comes from Asia where Taiwan and Korea are the two largest investors. The rest comes from US direct investment.

80 percent of the investment in El Salvador goes into the textile and garment industry. They carry the label ‘Made in El Salvador’.

Carolyn Jongeward

Wing-chung Ho

Ed Shepherd

In July 1999, AMRC hosted an exchange programme between working women and organisers from Asia and Latin America to discuss women working in Export Processing Zones (EPZ) in the two continents.

This year AMRC was invited to a follow-up exchange jointly organised by Latin American women’s groups. The meeting took place in Managua, capital of Nicaragua.

Papers from this conference form the basis of this issue of ALU.

Stephen Frost and May Wong

This is an edited version of the full report available from AMRC for US$20

Recently the Asia Monitor Resource Center published a report which assessed the way in which Mattel monitors its code of conduct. We called it Monitoring Mattel: Codes of conduct, workers and toys in southern China, and in it we tried to show the limitations inherent in the implementation and monitoring of codes in China (and perhaps elsewhere). We discussed many issues, but here I want to raise three of our major themes.

Alan Howard

One of the more amusing aspects of the controversy around the Fair Labor Association is that nearly five years after being convened by President Clinton, it has yet to produce a single report on the conduct of companies that claim to subscribe to its principles.

Until that happens, we can only comment on what has actually happened in the past five years and speculate on what impact the FLA might have in the future.

Ed Shepherd

Introduction

During the early 1990s consumer groups in Europe and the USA began campaigning against goods sold domestically but produced in sweatshops in Third World countries, particularly Latin America and Asia. (Sweatshops are now reappearing in First World countries like the USA and UK.)

Junya Yimprasert and Christopher Candland

Over the last year or so codes of conduct (or business responsibility) have been the focus of articles, books, and reports. The following list is not intended to represent a selection of the best (nor does it list everything), but is rather a mixture of different responses to the issue. We've listed material that ranges from corporate to critical. Many of the pieces are available online, but some may require the Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Dara O'Rourke

This is an edited version of Dara's full text, which can be found at http://web.mit.edu/dorourke/www/index.html

This report presents the first systematic public analysis of the code of conduct monitoring methods employed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to inspect factory labour practices around the world. The author accompanied PwC auditors on factory inspections in China and Korea, and evaluated PwC's findings for a factory in Indonesia.

Introduction

Emelia Yanti

The livelihoods and conditions of factory workers in Indonesia are constantly undermined. There is never any improvement in working conditions despite repeated attempts by the workers in accordance with existing laws embodied in International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions which are designed to protect workers.

Owners have created codes of conduct (CoCo) - a new type of regulation for workers in the garment and shoe sectors. However CoCos have not resulted in any real changes in working conditions of the workers.

 Angela Hale

E-mail: women-ww@mcr1.poptel.org.uk 
URL: http://www.poptel.org.uk/women-ww/

Stephen Frost

Most codes of conduct are too long for us to include in this issue, but many are online. If you can access these sites you can judge for yourself whether the corporate world is taking the issue of workers' rights seriously. This list does not include all companies with a code of conduct online, but it gives a range, both of sector and approach. It's worth noting that in our experience in the toy, footwear and garment sectors that most companies with an online presence do not post a code of conduct.