FLA ‘alternative’ to the DSP is just more corporate self-monitoring
FLA tells small companies: Just do it like Nike

After unleashing a campaign of disinformation against USAS’ Designated Suppliers Program (DSP) last year, the FLA has finally offered its own program to address widely-acknowledged shortcomings of the current approach to enforcing compliance with university codes of conduct. Unfortunately, the program, called the “Collegiate Licensee Screening and Compliance Initiative,” simply takes the same failed monitoring techniques used by the FLA’s member corporations and applies them to university licensees.

The new initiative is not an alternative to the DSP. It makes no attempt to address the fundamental obstacles to code compliance that the DSP was designed to tackle. It does not raise standards for factories. It does not introduce new or improved monitoring techniques. It does not even address the practices of the biggest university licensees (Nike, Adidas, etc.) at all. Instead, it requires that small licensees, which have not yet been subject to the FLA’s program, adopt the same self-regulatory approaches used by the larger licensees and member corporations. But by the FLA’s own admission, these monitoring programs are insufficient to ensure decent working conditions in the supply chains of large corporations. So why does the FLA think this scheme will help improve labor standards for all university licensees?

What is the “Collegiate Licensee Screening and Compliance Initiative”?

The new program consists of four components, according to the October 16, 2006 document released by the FLA:

1. Screening of licensees by universities with respect to capacity to implement a labor compliance program prior to granting a license: The FLA will develop a standardized questionnaire for universities to give to Category C companies, in order to gather information about those companies’ Code of Conduct compliance programs. Based on this information, universities are supposed to decide which licensees will be granted a license to produce logo apparel for their university.
2. A more robust application process for licensees seeking affiliation with the FLA: In order to become registered with the FLA, Category C companies must submit a plan for how they intend to comply with the FLA Code of Conduct and obligations of FLA companies. The FLA suggests two possible ways for Category C companies to meet these requirements: The first option is for the company to develop its own internal monitoring program, similar to those used by the larger FLA member companies. The second option is to source from what the FLA calls “compliance-ready factories,” which are already supposedly being monitored by the internal compliance programs of the larger brands. In either case, the requirement is that the factories must achieve compliance with FLA standards within three years.
3. Training licensees on how to build or enhance a labor compliance program: The third component of the program involves providing Category C licensees with an online tool kit about how to build a compliance program.
4. Frequent consultation with all stakeholders-especially licensees-on how to strengthen implementation of compliance programs: The FLA will create a committee that will give advice to the companies about how to administer their individual compliance programs.

What will this mean for workers?

As explained above, the new program does nothing to raise standards for factories or improve upon the corporate monitoring programs that have been failing workers for years. What it does do is place new burdens on affiliate universities and encourages all licensees to be more like sweatshop abusers Nike and Reebok. Each of these issues is discussed in more detail below.

FLA’s program doesn’t raise standards

It is important to understand that the FLA’s new licensee program does nothing to improve the standards to which factories must adhere. Unlike the DSP, which addresses some of the most pressing and widespread labor violations in the garment industry by introducing stricter standards to curb these abuses, the FLA’s new program makes no mention of tackling persistent workers’ rights violations or improving compliance at the factory level.

FLA’s program doesn’t involve improved monitoring techniques

By the FLA’s own admission, corporate monitoring programs have failed to bring real, sustainable change for workers. But the FLA’s new program does not introduce any new methods that would improve the way apparel brands ensure compliance. Unlike USAS’ DSP, the FLA’s program does nothing to address the business practices of apparel brands that result in sweatshop conditions. Its only purpose is to apply the same old monitoring techniques to a broader set of companies.

FLA requires universities to screen licensees, but not for actual compliance

A majority of this new program is simply a survey, in which companies will be asked to provide information about a range of issues such as the number of compliance staff they employ. Notably missing from this list of issues is anything related to the actual conditions in the licensees’ factories. And the FLA isn’t even administering this survey—they have assigned this task to university licensing administrators, apparently without any prior consultation with the university affiliates themselves. Not only does this place a substantial burden on universities to collect and analyze hundreds of surveys, but it makes no attempt to measure the most important element of any compliance program: whether workers’ rights are being respected at the factory level.

Nike, Adidas/Reebok, Jansport and Champion not covered

It is important to understand that this new program does nothing to address the sweatshop conditions in factories supplying our biggest licensees like Nike, Adidas/Reebok, Jansport and Champion. The FLA’s initiative only targets Category C licensees, which are relatively small companies. Given that about 40 large licensees account for 80% of the collegiate apparel market, a program that focuses exclusively on the smaller players is not going to meaningfully address the problem of workers’ rights abuses in the collegiate apparel industry.

FLA tells all licensees to be more like Nike

The underlying principle of the FLA’s new licensee program seems to be that the solution to the sweatshop problem is for all companies to be more like Nike and Adidas. The new initiative focuses exclusively on the need for smaller licensees to either a) adopt compliance programs identical to those that are already failing to have a real impact at bigger companies, or b) use factories that have already been subject to monitoring by the larger brands.

These new requirements assume that corporate compliance programs actually lead to meaningful improvements in the workplace, something which the experience of the WRC, FLA, and brands themselves has shown to be untrue. And the suggestion that smaller licensees use the same factories used by larger companies, while it does echo a fundamental principle of the DSP that the collegiate apparel supply chain must be consolidated, is meaningless as long as the only requirement for these “compliance-ready factories” is internal monitoring by companies like Nike, and not any objective measure of decent working conditions.

Not an alternative to the DSP

Unlike the FLA’s new program, USAS’ DSP calls for fundamental change in the way compliance issues are addressed. The DSP addresses the root causes of sweatshop labor by ensuring that apparel brands operate their global supply chains in a way that makes it possible for factories to meet university labor standards. It introduces new, stronger standards to curb some of the most prevalent workers’ rights abuses in the apparel industry, such as the lack of freedom of association and the abuse of contract labor systems to deny workers their wages and benefits. And it calls for meaningful, independent verification of compliance with all of these new standards.

The FLA’s new initiative serves only to demonstrate once again who’s really at the focus of the FLA’s work: big corporations. The Collegiate Licensee Screening and Compliance Initiative was developed without any consultation from workers and is yet another attempt to legitimize the failed system of corporate monitoring promoted by Nike and Adidas. We cannot allow universities or consumers to be misled into believing that the FLA’s “new” initiatives are anything different from its existing program, which has always served primarily to cover up the brands’ utter lack of seriousness about addressing labor rights violations in the apparel industry.