MINETTE BELLINGAN | Representative Director, CPLB
CATHERINE TILLEY | Lecturer in Business Ethics & Sustainability, King’s Business School

Every year, major brands commission hundreds of social audits to check conditions in their supply chains. Yet, unsafe or unethical labor practices persist. Work to address this problem has tended to focus on developing a framework for social sustainability or creating ever more different audits, codes of conduct, and checklists, rather than engaging with the people affected by working conditions – the factory workers themselves. In this article, we review a case where digital diaries were used to understand what matters to factory workers, considering how our insights might be used to improve the quality of social audits.