THIRD-PARTY CERTIFICATION
Fair Labor Association
For a list of Fair Labor Association Accredited Monitors, please visit the following page:
www.fairlabor.org
Overall Description:
The mission of the Fair Labor Association (FLA) is to combine the efforts of industry, civil society organizations, and colleges and universities to protect workers’ rights and improve working conditions worldwide by promoting adherence to international labor standards.
The FLA conducts independent monitoring and verification to ensure that the FLA’s Workplace Standards are upheld where FLA company products are produced. Through public reporting, the FLA provides consumers and shareholders with credible information to make responsible buying decisions.
The growth of the global economy has outstripped the mechanisms for regulating labor rights around the world. In principle, governments should adopt ILO Conventions and incorporate them into national labor laws enforced by labor inspectors. Trade unions and employers should negotiate collective agreements to fix wages and working conditions at sectoral or firm level and workers should have recourse to internal grievance procedures or external labor tribunals. In practice however, many of these protections have broken down. The FLA initiative is designed to complement international and national efforts to promote respect for labor rights.
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 advantage of FLA and its unique and far-reaching membership is the power of leverage. 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 with the FLA.
But the FLA is about much more than simply monitoring factories for violations. That is why the FLA is focused on building a newly enhanced system that promotes sustainable gains that help to increase the due diligence of factories in achieving higher standards and in making these factories more accessible for change. Our new FLA 3.0 system places even greater emphasis on determining the reasons for this noncompliance. It is helping to teach and support factories to build internal systems that ensure that workers’ voices are heard, prevent the same violations from occurring again, and establish a system for resolving future conflicts in way that ensures fair labor practices.
