Garment Factory Monitoring Needs to Improve

The International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Better Factories Cambodia (BFC) program must overhaul its monitoring practices before it can meaningfully improve working conditions in the garment sector, accoring to the authors of a new report. … …the new report by Community Legal Education Center and the Netherlands-based Clean Clothes Campaign, entitled 10 Years of Better Factories Cambodia Project, questions whether BFC has the capacity to do its job thoroughly. According to the report, the BFC is not making enough on-site visits to properly monitor factories, averaging just one visit per factory per year, while the majority of inspections are announced ahead of time, giving the factory management the chance to potentially hide violations. … BFC only releases general reports to the public while individual factory reports are given only to the factories themselves, creating no incentive for reform among factories, the report adds. Jill Tucker, chief technical adviser for BFC, said she agreed with most of the points in the report’s assessment, emphasizing that BFC is limited by its small staff. Ms. Tucker added that the organization is currently working to make more of their findings public. “It’s true that we are not equipped to respond to personal complaints. There are some 400,000 workers and only 13 monitors. However, we do have a system to track those complaints,” she said. …