Mock gong exposes award flaws
Launched by outworker protection campaign Fairwear, the inaugural 'Sweatshop Awards' - whose tagline is "excellence in avoiding transparency and accountability" - took place in Melbourne late last month. Womenswear label Ojay was awarded the dubious honour of first place, beating fellow nominees Kookai and Scanlan & Theodore. Womenswear label Feathers - initially nominated - was later withdrawn after it was found to be fully compliant.
Unsurprisingly the announcement has angered at least one of the brands involved, prompting Melbourne-headquartered chain Ojay to slam the implication it had breached the Clothing Trades Award 1999 as "outrageous".
Ojay general manager Henry Lee said 12 months ago one of the label's makers had been prosecuted by the Textile Clothing and Footwear Union (TCFUA) for non-compliance, but that was for an issue over paperwork. Lee said Ojay had not even been using the maker at the time.
The TCFUA had audited Ojay in November 2006 and found it to be "compliant in all areas", he said.
In response to the awards, Lee said Ojay had been singled out for the prize because it refused to sign up to outworker protection scheme the Homeworkers' Code of Practice (HCP), which ensures supply chain transparency in order to eliminate outworker exploitation.
Ojay had elected not to sign up to the code because the HCP was "inflexible and unworkable" for a number of reasons, Lee said.
These included the stipulation that companies pay outworkers hourly rather than piecework rates, an unrealistic rule since many outworkers voluntarily worked from home. Furthermore the requirement for a guaranteed minimum and maximum workload per fortnight gave "no consideration to seasonal fluctuations", while overtime restrictions were "overly prescriptive" as some garments required urgent turnaround. Lee said the requirement for formal termination of outworkers in lean periods as "ludicrous" because it did not account for production cycle peaks and troughs.
While declining to comment specifically on Ojay's case, TCFUA national secretary Tony Woolgar said the union supported all initiatives promoting the protection of outworkers.
However, Australian Fashion Council (AFC) head Zoe Edquist was quick to condemn the Sweatshop Awards.
"Ojay is certainly not alone in not signing the HCP, which is a voluntary industry code and totally separate from its legal obligations under the award. To single out a business such as Ojay for this type of treatment is not only dishonest but quite possibly defamatory."
According to Edquist the seemingly intractable debate over outworkers and the HCP pointed up deeper systemic flaws in the legislation.
"We believe the award contains serious drafting defects that have caused major confusion about the definition of outworker and contractor.
"Out of thousands of fashion companies in Australia only a tiny percentage are 'officially' compliant. The rest cannot possibly all be crooked, but the award is impossible to comply with if you want to stay in business."
Notwithstanding flaws in the award, the implementation of the HCP had also been misguided, Edquist said.
"The AFC fully supports the underlying principal of the HCP, but we believe that the code needs to be promoted in a positive way, rather than in the negative and aggressive way employed by Fairwear."
Punitive treatment of companies that did not sign up to the code made "a mockery" of the voluntary spirit of the HCP, she said.
"It's absurd. It's tantamount to The Heart Foundation bad-mouthing a company that doesn't carry the Heart Foundation approval 'tick'."
For her part, Fairwear campaign coordinator Daisy Gardener remained unrepentant.
"Consumers have a right to know if companies are contributing to outworker exploitation. The only way for companies to provide ongoing transparency in this regard is to sign up to the HCP. The fact that a company is found to be compliant on one occasion does not mean it will continue to be so."
Neither Kookai nor Scanlan & Theodore were available at the time of press.