Members of the Workers Rights Program participated in “Building Bridges Towards Sustainable Monitoring”, a Fair Labor Association (FLA) conference for NGO’s held January 12-15 at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok. The NGO Consultation was sponsored by the FLA and brought together over fifty NGOs and trade union representatives primarily from Asian countries, with some other key participants from Central America, Africa, Europe and North America. Human Rights First co-organized the consultation with the FLA, the Maquila Solidarity Network, the Clean Clothes Campaign (International Secretariat), the NGO Caucus of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) and the International Labor Rights Fund.

Human Rights First has been deeply involved in the FLA since its inception in 1996, and now sits on the FLA’s board. The FLA was created to bring together companies, NGOs, unions, independent monitors, and universities and their licensees to work together to improve working conditions in factories and promote respect for international labor standards in global production chains. By participating in the FLA, companies commit to implement the FLA code of conduct, to undertake a yearly process of internal and external monitoring, to remedy labor problems in the factories, and to submit a public report on their performance. Thanks to a recently signed transparency agreement championed by Human Rights First, the results of these external monitoring visits and reports on the internal monitoring programs of companies will soon be made public. Human Rights First believes transparency is crucial to creating an effective monitoring system.

Conversations at the Consultation explored the current challenges and opportunities for improving labor conditions through monitoring and organizing initiatives at the factory level and through the multistakeholder initiatives, including FLA, ETI, the Fair Wear Foundation (FWF) and the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), all represented at the Consultation. The discussions provided a forum for sharing a wide range of experiences and perspectives. Major topics discussed were the role of local NGOs in monitoring and multistakeholder initiatives, the quality of monitoring, the relationship between monitoring and creating a space for freedom of association, government regulation and enforcement, worker education and awareness about codes of conduct and monitoring, and company commitment to factories who are compliant with their code and pricing decisions.

Human Rights First also continues its work in developing the NGO Advisory Council of the FLA. The NGO Advisory Council is a network of organizations from around the world that aims to provide the FLA with on-the-spot information about working conditions and works to help shape and evaluate FLA standards. The NGO Advisory Council is also helping to build capacity among NGOs worldwide to play a role in independent monitoring. Human Rights First convened an NGO Advisory Council caucus on the final day of the meeting, bringing together NGO’s already on the Advisory Council and those seeking to join it.

Two issues in particular were emphasized by the participants at this meeting. One issue is the need to develop structures for information sharing between NGO’s and the FLA. To this end, Human Rights First, which heads the Council, has established a listserve on which NGO’s can share views and confer on issues and proposals to be brought to the table at board meetings. Second, participants stressed the importance of thinking about ways that FLA monitoring can facilitate worker organizing. To accomplish this, the NGO’s resolved to continue developing the FLA’s third-party complaint system, an aspect of the monitoring process that Human Rights First is committed to helping to build.