The face of the business world has been changing over the last thirty years, as consumers are becoming wiser about ethical practices by companies. More consumers are requiring for the products they purchase to be ethically sound and for the companies to deliver on their codes of conduct.

In 1997, the discovery of a sweatshop by an Observer investigation caused major embarrassment for retail giant Gap. Major retailer Walmart, was also embroiled in a child labour scandal after children as young as five were found working on a farm that supplies blueberries to the company.
A growing interest in ethical trade meant that a number of initiatives were set up in the 1990s in order to deal with this problem. The Apparel Industry Partnership was set up by the White House in 1996 in order to combat sweatshops. It included corporate, trades union, and NGO members, but many non-profit organizations and unions that had originally supported it, started pulling out. In 2000, the AIP was renamed the Fair Labor Association. The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Purposes was also set up to tackle this problem.

The Ethical Trading Initiative was initiated in the UK in 1998 to bring together NGOs, and unions to promote good practices in businesses. The ETI has been successful in obtaining the membership of big corporations such as Body Shop, Levis, Marks and Spencer amongst others. The Clean Clothes Campaign was set up in the Netherlands to improve working conditions in the global garment and sportswear industries.

However, although these initiatives have been successful in their own right, one unified standard needed to be implemented for companies to conform to. Increasing reports by the media on violation of human rights and discrimination led to the SA 8000 being created in 1997. SA 8000 was developed by the Social Accountability International and aims at providing external evidence that a company is behaving in a socially responsible manner. The SA 8000 is grounded on the principles of core ILO conventions, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A listing of SA 8000 certified companies can be found here.

Scandals of contaminations being found in products led to increasing pressure on companies to operate in a more ‘socially responsible manner’. Many of these businesses have supply chains originating in China. Therefore, many of the Chinese suppliers are being pressured to comply with SA 8000. China produces 80 percent of the world’s toys, and the costly recall in 2007 by Mattel of millions of toys tainted with lead paint demonstrated the dangerous consequences for Western countries if they neglect to hold their suppliers to account. As the ‘Made in China’ label has become a universal trend, it is obvious that China is a focal point in the global supply chain. As a result of these scandals hitting China, Chinese companies have taken steps to embrace domestic and international standards. In 2005 China collaborated with the EU to formulate the China Social Compliance standard for the textile industry. The CSC9000T is a mixture between the management standard ISO 9000 and SA 8000. SA 8000 is based on international labour and human rights law, whilst CSC9000T is based on Chinese labour law. Since the launch of CSC9000T in 2005, it had been reported that around 170 Chinese firms had signed up to participate. In addition, two major foreign investors, the Hudson Bay Company and Linmark had agreed to work with their suppliers to implement the code. The SAAS reported 242 SA 8000 certified Chinese facilities in 2009.