The Fair Labor Association released its first-ever public report June 4, revealing findings from independent audits of seven major footwear and apparel companies. Nike, which the University has licensed to make apparel bearing the Duke logo, was noted for its efforts to establish fair labor practices under the FLA's formal monitoring program from Aug. 2001 through July 2002.
For example, in trying to ensure against forced labor, Nike developed the NIKE Village project, which encourages contractors to establish production facilities in rural areas so that workers are not forced to move to unfamiliar urban centers to find formal employment. To combat child labor, Nike continued participation in a project initiated in 1997 in Pakistan, where the company supported an independent monitoring body aimed at eliminating child labor in the soccer apparel industry.
President Nan Keohane said she was pleased with the publication of the report by the FLA, which the University played a large role in developing.
"We are glad that the effort Duke helped launch has been successful in monitoring companies and bringing information back to interested consumers," she wrote in an e-mail. "This report demonstrates that effective monitoring can happen, and that companies can indeed be persuaded to act in response to findings from an independent body backed by consumers and activists who care about this issue."
Jim Wilkerson, director of Duke Stores, noted the frankness and transparency of the report.
"It was what was expected and required," he wrote in an e-mail. "For those people and organizations who are interested in these issues, I think the release of this information to the public is confirmation of the FLA's commitment and seriousness to doing what it can to help eliminate abusive and unfair labor conditions."
Despite some people's past misgivings regarding the role corporations play in the FLA - misgivings that influenced the University's decision also to enter the Worker Rights Consortium, which takes a slightly different approach to monitoring companies' labor practices - Wilkerson said he was confident in the FLA's monitoring methods.
"The FLA looks at the WRC, the WRC looks at the FLA, and lots of people and organizations around the world are looking at both of them," he wrote.
Duke was one of the first universities to champion the anti-sweatshop movement in the late 1990s. In 1997, the fledgling Students Against Sweatshops organization brought unfair labor practices to Keohane's attention and requested University action against such practices, especially in companies that manufactured Duke products.
In 1998, Duke became the country's first university to adopt a code of conduct that required licensees, their contractors and sub-contractors to accept independent monitoring of factory working conditions. Later that year, Duke became the first university member of the Apparel Industry Partnership, which would eventually become the FLA.
Duke and the 178 other colleges and universities affiliated with the FLA require all of their licensees to participate in the organization.
The seven companies included in the report were adidas-Salomon; Eddie Bauer; Levi Strauss and Co.; Liz Claiborne, Inc.; Nike; Phillips-Van Heusen; and Reebok. Wilkerson said Nike is the only one of the seven licensed by Duke.
Nike conducted two types of auditing on its facilities across the world - 1,056 by Nike staff and 426 through third-party monitors. During the yearlong monitoring period, FLA-accredited independent monitors also monitored 63 applicable Nike footwear and apparel and equipment factories, or eight percent of Nike's applicable facilities.
The FLA report stressed that no trends could be determined based on the first year of monitoring. In the second year of monitoring, the organization plans to increase its own independence in the monitoring process as well as try to be more transparent with the results of factory monitoring and more collaborative in its approach to ensuring compliance.
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