Recommended reading
Wal-Mart’s sweatshop monitoring fails to catch violations: the story of toys made in China for Wal-Mart
Violating code of conduct: Wal-Mart suppliers in China
Authors:
; SACOM
Publisher:
Clean Clothes Campaign, 2007
This paper investigates corporate misbehaviour by China’s eighth largest trading partner, Wal-Mart. The focus is on China’s export oriented toy industry and Wal-Mart’s unethical sourcing policies in five Chinese supplier factories.
The research shows that Wal-mart consistently fails to catch and stop serious labour violations in its Chinese supplier factories, despite recent reforms to its monitoring system. Among the incriminating findings are excessive and forced overtime, wage violations and non-provision of social security for staff.
Key demands set out include that Wal-mart must:
- strictly enforce Chinese labour law and trade union law to safeguard workers’ lawful rights
- give every worker at every supplier a written employment contract and a copy of Wal-Mart’s Code of Conduct in Chinese
- increase the level of corporate transparency by publicly disclosing the names and addresses of all supplier factories
- pro-actively work with suppliers to enhance labour rights through sharing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) implementation costs and reforming sourcing policies.
