FLA 3.0 – Toward Sustainable Compliance

Since the 1990s, brand-name companies sourcing products from externally owned factories have been under ever-increasing pressure to improve working conditions in those factories. This has historically been done through audits, by finding the compliance violation and fixing it. However, audits are often perceived as policing; factories know they will fail and therefore try to hide the problems in order to get a good auditing result. This results in no trust between customers and their suppliers, and most importantly, only the finding is treated and not the cause, which will inevitably result in the problem reoccurring.

FLA 3.0, the FLA’s new sustainable compliance methodology, is a combination of online and offline tools designed to help factories assess their own level of labor compliance and build capacity to implement system to fill compliance gaps by addressing root causes of labor violations. Factories work in collaboration with affiliated companies and the FLA to take increasing responsibility for the progress and sustainability of their labor compliance programs. FLA 3.0 shifts the monitoring emphasis from policing to partnership. In the partnership approach, the 3.0 assessment reveals substantive information about the factory’s strengths and weaknesses and provides a roadmap for improvement. The results from the 3.0 assessment are used to develop a capacity building program; evaluation of compliance is conducted upon successful implementation of the capacity building efforts and not at the beginning of the process when progress is yet to be made. FLA 3.0 is currently being implemented in select factories being used by FLA Participating Companies in China and Thailand, with Central America being a focus region for 2008.

How FLA 3.0 works

FLA 3.0 leverages multi-stakeholder partnerships to develop capacity for labor compliance at the factory level. It is an integrated approach to sustainable compliance that pools constituent resources and increases collaboration. Additionally, it focuses on the identification and remediation of root causes of persistent and serious noncompliance issues so that a more systematic approach can be applied at the supplier level. Finally, it creates opportunities for local stakeholders to play an integral role in identifying key compliance issues, provide remedial and capacity building services, and assess progress made by suppliers over time. In coalescing around these goals, this new methodology will emphasize and measure the progress and the impact of the labor compliance program, which traditional checklist questionnaires have never been able to capture. In this way, we hope to both enhance the positive contribution to improving workers’ lives and increase the efficacy and public reporting of labor compliance programs.

For more information about FLA 3.0, contact Richa Mittal at  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .