Autry & Davis-Sramek rightly call corporate responsibility for worker safety in supply chains a business “imperative”, but radically misstate how improvements occur.  They say that activist pressure to improve working conditions is unnecessary and even counterproductive, because firms can be relied on to act voluntarily...but the actual history in Bangladesh belies their argument.

US retailers formed their safety initiative, known as the Alliance, after the Rana Plaza disaster in 2013, but workers have been dying in garment factories in Bangladesh for twenty years... Retailers long knew their contract factories were grossly unsafe, but despite pledges to conduct regular safety inspections, they never addressed the problem. 

The writers say activists make unreasonable demands and thereby jeopardize jobs in places like Bangladesh. Yet the Alliance claims to make some of the very reforms activists long demanded, such as funding for factory safety renovations and public reporting of inspection results. Retailers in the Alliance had rejected these ideas as unworkable, until Rana Plaza made them reconsider. More encouraging, over 200 retailers have joined a stronger initiative on workplace safety, the Bangladesh Accord, which improves protection for vulnerable workers by placing them in the driver’s seat to enforce safety norms.  

The writers fail to grasp that today’s “unrealistic demand” is tomorrow’s corporate social responsibility innovation.  And advocacy demands become corporate practice largely due to pressure from without--from consumers, media, and yes, activists--not voluntary corporate self-improvement.