Factory disclosure has been requested by labour rights activists as it allows the monitoring of labour practices along the global supply chain.
"[Companies] produce glossy CSR [corporate social responsibility] reports that show all sorts of statistics about how contractors are or are not complying with their codes of conduct. However, these companies nevertheless resist
factory disclosure on a number of grounds. […] This concern about competitors learning the identity of their supplier factories and exploiting that knowledge is the most common retort of corporations who resist
factory disclosure. […]
Proponents of
factory disclosure argue that, without disclosure, it is very difficult and expensive for private activists to link factories to brands given their limited resources and the vast size of global supply chains.
Factory disclosure empowers them by dramatically lowering the cost of conducting their research and organizing global research networks."
(Doorey, D. J.,
The Transparent Supply Chain: from Resistance to Implementation at Nike and Levi-Strauss, Journal of Business Ethics, 2011, visited 2012-02-07)
