ABSTRACT
In 2005-2006, the German retailer Tchibo was targeted by the Clean Clothes Campaign due to critical working conditions in supplier factories in Bangladesh. It was the first time Tchibo had been confronted with the need to build up professional sustainability management. The privately-held company took the decision to make sustainability an integral part of its business strategy. The Corporate Responsibility(CR) department was set up to ensure the incorporation of sustainability into core business functions and processes, reporting directly to the CEO. As one of the first priorities, the Tchibo management team considered how best to tackle the issue of working conditions in the supply chain. ‘We analysed existing approaches,’ remembers Nanda Bergstein, who was the WE Project Manager for Tchibo, ‘and at that time social auditing was the focus of most brands and retailers. Due to its top-down approach, however, this instrument is not very effective in initiating improvement. In fact, most audits are considered to be manipulated or faked and thus do not drive social change.’ Therefore, the first driver for the WE Project, jointly initiated by Tchibo and German development organization GIZ,1 was that an alternative to audits had to be found. Secondly, the Tchibo team learned that ensuring human rights in the workplace is primarily about building up relations between workers, their representatives, managers and buyers. In Asia, a lot of discrimination exists in factories, as well as a real communication gap between workers and managers. Apart from the consequences for the way workers are treated, this leads to disruptions in the production process, with a negative impact on economic sustainability. Bergstein adds:
Based on these drivers, our idea was to work on the factory floor, to empower managers and workers to bridge the communication barriers and to achieve real improvements in working conditions, but also to be part of this process as a company. A clear challenge emerged here: we found that there was a lack of local qualified trainers familiar with the culture and local language.
