Blog of Q's

From the Financial Times, April 22, 2005. Thanks to Michael Allen for alerting us.

Factory managers in China are becoming increasingly sophisticated at
falsifying worker time cards and payroll documents to disguise
irregularities including underpayment, excessive hours and inadequate
health and safety provision. Auditors estimate that more than half of
factories they see in China are forging some of their records …The
widespread forging of records threatens to undermine the aims of the
corporate social responsibility movement, a response by multinationals
to the concerns of customers, non-governmental organisations and trades
unions about issues including human rights and the environment.
…
The factory manager said he had assigned a team of six employees to
create a paper trail of fake documents for foreign buyers. Some of
these workers punched fake time cards to give the impression that the
stipulations of buyers were being met. One was charged with creating
matching payroll records on the computer.
…
One Hong Kong-owned toy factory even assigned workers to rubbing
falsified time cards in dirt to make them look genuine … Some
factories coach their employees ahead of auditors’ visits on how to
answer their questions. One sign posted in a footwear factory in
Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, and obtained by an
auditor reminds managers of the various weekly working hours required
by different buyers. “Please educate the workers well to avoid telling
the client the truth,” it says.

A document used in October 2003 to coach workers at a factory in
Huizhou, another city in Guangdong, warned staff that the factory had
received notice that Liz Claiborne representatives would be coming for
an audit the following Tuesday. “All departments and all work places
should organise a training for workers to prepare for this,” it said,
warning that “workers should not be allowed to let the buyers know that
we have given prior training to workers based on the specifics of the
workers’ interview”.
…
While persuading most auditors that his records were genuine was not
hard, said the Guangdong factory manager observed by the FT, workers
were harder to control. “I just stand outside the door and pray to God”
during worker interviews, the manager added.