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The Softer Corporate Side:
Gap Hires a Public Opinion Company to Find Out What Its Image Should Be
(National Labor Committee, august 1997)
GAP has retained Charlton Research Company, which describes itself as a "national pubic opinion research firm." Charlton Research is presently contacting individuals and organizations across the country, asking them what makes a good corporate citizen; what "is the role of business in today's global economy," and "what steps should a company take to be responsible in the area of sourcing?"This is all very interesting, but there is something fishy going on here. The GAP has already heard from the American people. If you truly respect human rights, as you say you do, then open your contractors' factories to independent monitoring by respected local religious and human rights leaders. The tens of thousands of people involved in the GAP campaign won a historic breakthrough, when the GAP agreed to open its contractor's plant in El Salvador to monitoring by the Human Rights Department of the Jesuit University, by the Archdiocese Human Rights Office, and by the Center for Labor Research.
The problem is that the moment pressure from the campaign was lifted, the GAP stopped dead in its tracks.
The Gap currently uses 1,000 contractors in 50 countries around the world. Yet the Mandarin factory in El Salvador is the only one to date which has been opened to independent monitoring. For the rest, it is business as usual behind closed doors. This means that only 1/10 of one percent of GAP's operations are being adequately monitored.
On top of that, GAP has refused to put a penny into the independent monitoring project in El Salvador - though they apparently have money for Charlton Research - saying that they are happy to put their "sweat" into the effort, but no money.
In nearby Honduras, another prestigious independent monitoring group, composed of the Jesuits, the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CODEH), the Catholic Charity, CARITAS, and a women's group, CODEMUH, has been established. The GAP has nearly 20 contractors in Honduras, but the GAP is nowhere to be seen when it comes to opening these 20 plants to truly independent verification so that human rights standards can be guaranteed. Yet that is exactly what the GAP agreed to do when the campaign was called off.
If the GAP truly wants to be a good corporate citizen, it should open its contractors' plants to independent monitoring, and it should guarantee the right of its workers to negotiate a contract that pays a living wage. All the rest is just hot air.
And the GAP is among the better companies. One could ask even more loudly, where s Levi Strauss, NIKE, Liz Claiborne, May, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, Federated, Warnaco, Kmart...? If they have nothing to hide, let them give us one good reason why their factories should not be open to inspection by respected religious and human rights leaders.
The moral of this story is that without popular pressure, without public understanding and discussion of the real issues, the companies will always slide back into public relation's sleights-of-hand. Only with social movement can we escape business as usual.
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