Fair Labor Association History

← Back to the current Fair Labor Association profile

The Company Description of Its Time

The Fair Labor Association (FLA) is filed as a non-profit organization dedicated to ending sweatshop conditions in factories worldwide and building innovative and sustainable solutions to abusive labor conditions. The historical record is honest about the scale of the problem: ending sweatshop labor is an enormous challenge with no single solution, particularly when the global economy is expanding in new, and often unpredictable, ways. The FLA's answer to that scale is coalition. Progress, the filing says, comes by bringing to the table the combined voices and power of universities and colleges, companies and other parties from the manufacturing and marketing process, and many non-governmental organizations dedicated to protecting the rights of workers around the world.

The Workplace Code and the Power of Leverage

At the core of the FLA mission is a process of monitoring factory compliance, reporting that record publicly, and working to ensure that any problems discovered are corrected. The enforcement mechanism is affiliation itself: when a company or brand agrees to affiliate with the FLA, they must comply with and enforce the FLA's Workplace Code of Conduct in those factories within the agreement. The advantage of the FLA, the filing says, is its unique and far-reaching membership - the power of leverage. A university's licensing programme, a brand's factory list and an NGO's local knowledge pull on the same factory from different directions, and no single one of them could pull as hard alone.

The filing is equally clear that the FLA is about much more than simply monitoring factories for violations. Its focus is a newly enhanced system that promotes sustainable gains: increasing the due diligence of factories in achieving higher standards and making factories more accessible for change. The new processes and reporting methods aim to teach and support factories to build internal systems that ensure workers' voices are heard, prevent the same violations from occurring again, and establish a system for resolving future conflicts in a way that ensures fair labor practices. Monitoring finds the violation; the system is meant to make the violation stop recurring. The historical record gives the contact as info@FairLabor.org, and points readers interested in the same questions to Free2Work, filed next in this letter's neighbourhood of labour-rights profiles.

← Back to the current Fair Labor Association profile