Social auditing

Social accounting and auditing is a way of measuring and reporting on an organisation's social and ethical performance. An organisation which takes on an audit makes itself accountable to its stakeholders and commits itself to following the audits recommendations. Labour-related NGOs and trade unions have to be involved at the local production level if good quality monitoring and credible verification is to take place. Most social audits presently are carried out by specialized firms (often quality control firms) who lack the possibility for realizing such involvement, and consequently the quality of the audit suffers. This is something that the CCC has always believed, but the pilot projects have enabled us to gather concrete evidence to support this belief - something, which is helping companies to begin to accept this position. The precise role which these groups should play in monitoring and verification systems is still something that needs considerable attention, as the varied contexts found throughout the global garment industry means that what works or is appropriate in some situations might not be feasible in others.

Auditing also requires multiple skills and a participatory and often qualitative approach that is hard to find within one organization. The pilots included combinations of NGO staff for worker interviews and commercial firms for workplace inspections. The results were mixed, and the approach of developing specially trained teams, tested out in the FWF pilots has more perspective.