WASHINGTON — The leading federation of labor unions in the U.S. has issued a withering critique of so-called social auditing programs, the corporate-funded inspection systems now used by major American companies to monitor working conditions in their supply chains here and abroad.

Entitled “Responsibility Outsourced,” the 60-page report from the AFL-CIO (below) accuses such programs of catering to corporations at the expense of factory workers in places like Pakistan, Indonesia, China and Latin America, calling the certification process for garment plants a “facade” of voluntary and non-binding scrutiny compromised by conflicts of interest.

“Not only has it helped keep wages low and working conditions poor,” the report’s foreword states of the auditing industry, “it has provided public relations cover for producers whose disregard for health and safety has cost hundreds of lives.” It determines the “central failing” of such audits to be “short and cursory visits to factories and no proper discussion with workers.”

The report follows several high-profile workplace disasters in Asia, including a massive factory fire in Pakistan that claimed the lives of more than 260 garment workers last year. Survivors of that tragedy said locked emergency exits and bars over factory windows had turned the plant into a deathtrap. Even so, the facility had recently earned a certification under the authority of a leading social-auditing group, the non-profit Social Accountability International.

“The certification and monitoring systems used by these initiatives,” the report claims, “cannot be relied on to deliver on even the most basic of goals: stopping entirely preventable deaths caused by factory owners’ negligence or outright refusal to observe the most basic safety requirements.”

Social Accountability International is a recipient of much of the report’s criticisms, along with another non-profit, the Fair Labor Association, which has monitored the Foxconn plant that supplies Apple.

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