Fast Company: Wal-Mart's Factory Inspection Program Really Just Vast PR Effort

Wal-Mart like to brag about its extensive oversears factory inspection program.  But Fast Company questions whether the whole thing is just a vast PR effort.

From Fast Company: 

But if you look closely at Wal-Mart's own 44-page report of its performance (issued last June), Wal-Mart's factory inspection program begins to look like an energetic PR effort, more than a serious effort to protect factory workers.

Of the 12,500 inspections in 2004, only 8 percent were surprise inspections. That means 92 percent of Wal-Mart's inspections of factories in Bangladesh and Nicaragua and China were announced in advance -- the Wal-Mart inspectors made an appointment to come see how the factory was run.

Of those 11,500 pre-announced inspections, at least 8,900 resulted in violations of Wal-Mart's own policies serious enough to suspend the factory, or put it on notice. That’s a 77 percent failure rate.

The Wal-Mart supplier standards program has been in place since 1992. The standards are required to be posted on the walls in factories supplying Wal-Mart, in the local language, so workers themselves can see them. Factory managers are required to sign a copy of the standards, as part of their contract to make merchandise for Wal-Mart.

And yet... in 77 percent of those factories in 2004, with the factory managers knowing Wal-Mart inspectors were coming, Wal-Mart found violations it considered serious.

So what are those factories like on the 364 days a year when the factory managers know Wal-Mart inspectors aren't coming? And how seriously are Wal-Mart's suppliers taking the standards?

Those seem like really good questions to me.