Dear friends,

Find below some resources/publications of the last month or so that might be of interest:

The full report of the Clean Clothes International Meeting(organized earlier this year in Barcelona) is now available and downloadable from our website. It contains the outcomes of our evaluation process AND strategic ideas and an agenda for action for the coming years...for those of you having difficulty downloading PDF files, we can send you a hard copy. CCC-Barcelona.pdf

The CCC in the Netherlands commisioned SOMO to do a research into the " reality behind the code " of the Netherlands' largest retail concern Vendex/KBB. The report is now available in english at http://www.cleanclothes.org/documents/reality-behind-the-code.PDF The study gives detailed information on the working conditions in 12 factories producing for the concern in Sri Lanka and India. Worker interviews were done by local NGO's, the SOMO staff interviewed management. The study also looks into the effectiviness of the company codes. The factories concerned also producefor Karstadt/Quelle, the GAP, Tommy Hilfiger, C&A, Fila and other european and american buyers. If downloading pdf files is problematic let us know and we can email a word file or you can order a hard copy (10 US) via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

The Maquiladora Health & Safety Support Network published the fifth issue of their newsletter last september.Updates are given on current health and safety training programmes (a.o. in China), a review of the recently released maquila worker wage study report and updates on activities of the Health and Safety network. Inside the newsletter you can find also a very good resourcelist... http://www.igc.org/mhssn/news.htm

Sweatshop-related issueshave been discussed extensively over the past period among health and safety professionals, who can be involved in our work more intensively and in more capacities then is presently the case. For more background on this see also the white paper produced by AIHA (American Industrial Hygiene Organisation)
http://www.aiha.org/governmentaffairs-pr/html/prsweatshops.htm

SOMO and the CCC organized a meeting october 2 and 3 in Brussels, evaluating the European monitoring and verification initiatives . A report of the meeting will be send out over the list in a few weeks, for now the discussionpaper that was written prior to the meeting can be found in french, spanish and english at the SOMO website http://www.cleanclothes.org/codes/monitoring/reports.htm At the same website you can also find updates on the different European initiatives as well as news from other monitoring and verification projects.

The Independent Monitoring Working Group (IMWG) released a report in the first week of september on the history and development of independent factory monitoring initiatives in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras(such as the work done by GMIES and COVERVO on the GAP) . The report describes the background of the work done by the Central American independent monitoring groups and gives insight in how the different partners worked together over the years. You can find it at: http://www.iccr.org/news/press_releases/pr_imwg.htm

For more detail on the findings of the monitoring groups , for example the two reports released by GMIES on Liz Claiborne and Coverco on the Gap check the latest codes memo (number 8) from Maquila Solidarity Network, which also includes an excellent report on SA 8000. For those of you who have not seen it already you can find the memo on http://www.maquilasolidarity.org/resources/codes/memo8.htm#E