Third Party Complaint Case Studies

The Third Party Complaint procedure enables any person or organization to report to the FLA allegations of significant and/or persistent patterns of noncompliance, or an individual incident of serious noncompliance, with the FLA Workplace Code of Conduct in production facilities of FLA-affiliated companies, as well as in those of College and University licensees that participate in FLA monitoring programs. It functions as a safety valve to ensure that workers in FLA-applicable factories have recourse to address instances of noncompliance. A key part of the procedure is remediation of any verified instances of noncompliance through corrective action. Click here to learn more about the FLA’s Third Party Complaint Procedure.

Issues that are brought to the attention of the FLA through the third party complaint procedure tend to be urgent, controversial, complex, and rooted in long-standing practices. The experience of the FLA is that it is necessary to address not only the symptoms of noncompliance to temporarily resolve a third party complaint, but to get at the root causes to seek more sustainable solutions. This often involves mediation rather than corrective action, particularly in freedom of association cases where the conflict between labor and management needs to be resolved and the relationship between them repaired.

This section provides case studies of two third party complaints that were brought before the FLA since last year’s report. The case studies provide some background necessary to understand the larger context in which the noncompliance issues arose as well as particular factory situations. The case studies document how the third party complaints have required that the FLA grapple with some of the most difficult code issues and engage with constituents ranging from trade unions and NGOs to affiliated and non-affiliated PCs.

Following the pattern of third party complaints reported in earlier Public Reports, the two case studies relate to freedom of association. The fact that a majority of third party complaints received by the FLA to date have focused on noncompliance with freedom of association strongly indicates that this is a challenging Code provision to monitor and remediate.