Previous Story
Oversight board sets inspections on garment factories
|
Posted on Aug 17 2004
Beginning Monday next week, the garment oversight board tasked to monitor compliance by participating garment firms to a class action settlement will conduct inspections on 36 factories and subcontractors.
The inspections will be the second batch after the creation of the board sometime last year.
Timothy Bellas, the board’s chair, said two consulting firms, Vérité and Global Social Compliance, would conduct the inspections. He said the garment factories and an attorney representing the workers nominated the two firms.
There are actually 27 garment companies that participated in the settlement agreement, Bellas said. Some of them, however, have subcontractors, the facilities of which would also be inspected.
Bellas said the inspections would be conducted to ensure that the garment firms are complying with some 59 standards set by the agreement in several aspects of the firms’ operations, including occupational safety, as well as workers’ living conditions and wages.
The garment oversight board conducted the first batch of inspections in Oct. 2003.
The oversight board came to existence when U.S. District Court Chief Judge Alex R. Munson approved the settlement agreement in the class action suit in May last year. The $20-million settlement earmarked $4-million as monitoring fund.
The board’s creation has helped regain garment retailers’ confidence and achieved improvements in the garment workplaces.
Besides Bellas, a former Superior Court judge, two other former magistrates compose the board, including Cruz Reynoso, a former California Supreme Court justice, and Richard P. Guy, former Chief Justice of the Washington State Supreme Court.
