What is the scope of your inspections?
Are you obliged to inspect for compliance with local labor laws? Health and safety? Or just the garments themselves?
Has your organization promised to protect the reputation of the stores or just to avoid buying badly made products?
Sarah O’Connor of Financial Times in the UK reported on May 17, 2018 how clothing manufacturers in England are flouting minimum wage laws:
extract:
“How is it possible to make cheap clothes in a country where the minimum wage for over-25s is £7.83 an hour? Online retailers’ nimbleness and lower overheads allow them to pay more for products while still giving consumers a good price. In addition, there are manufacturers that use technology to make clothes more efficiently. But factory owners in Leicester say some take a different route, one more reminiscent of the 19th century than the 21st. They call these places “dark factories.” Part of Leicester’s garment industry has become detached from UK employment law, “a country within a country”, as one factory owner puts it, where “£5 an hour is considered the top wage”, even though that is illegal. Doshi (not his real name) says he has worked in places with blocked fire escapes, old machines and no holiday or sick pay. There are garment factories that follow the law, but a “perceived culture of impunity”, as a 2018 government report puts it, has created a bizarre microeconomy where larger factories using machines are outcompeted by smaller rivals using underpaid humans.”
So, you may be inspecting factories that have not much respect for the law. Is your firm promising to counter that?
When we understand your organization’s mission we can advise on quality objectives for your management system.
