Considering Corporate Responsibility

I had the opportunity to have lunch with Kelly Leary, a Director of Sourcing, who is responsible for corporate responsibility/compliance in our overseas manufacturing. He is a lovely man -- used to work in logistics, then owned an Irish brew pub, and returned not more than a year ago to bring CWC into regulatory and social compliance with its operations abroad. The job is a tricky one, as I am learning.

As I understand, the merchandising teams travel to Europe to find the next-best trend and then sends it to our design studio in New York. There, they come up with a CWC version and work with in-country fabric sourcers to determine what materials are needed and what is available. In the past, they then farmed it out to middle-men buyers who would commit to getting the garment made (completely unregulated as to where and how they do so). The product would arrive in bulk miraculously in some warehouse in Jersey and then be shipped to our stores to our customers' delight.

Today, however, the process is changing. Our Sourcing department is not only trying to replace the middle-men and go in-country themselves to do business with the factories -- they are also requiring transparency on the part of those buyers who remain to disclose where the products are being made, including what factories are used. This then allows CWC to actually see the methods of production, to tour the factory floors and determine whether or not they meet certain health and safety standards. It seems like such an obvious part of doing business, yet this view into the "buyer's sourcing" has not previously been scrutinized.

We talked for over an hour about cultural relativity, "First World" arrogance, and the need to be conscientiously cautious when building relationships with the factories overseas. It occurred to me that so many of my own perceived horrors about "Latin American sweatshops" are very tied in with my own ignorance about blue collar factory work and my own myopic denials of class privilege. I appreciated our discussion about our culture's obsession with material consumption driving the changing landscape of global manufacturing. I also was struck when Kelly reminded me that was not so long ago that his grandfather was working in unregulated coal mines in Montana right here in the USA, underpaid and underprotected.

At the end of the conversation, he directed me to the Business for Social Responsibility website and told me that I might find some interesting reading material there -- so I pass this on here: http://www.bsr.org/CSRResources/FeaturedResources.cfm#50904

Just a few more things to consider on yet another day at the job.