De Lacey continued, “In many cases, social audits failed to detect human rights abuses, meaning that abuse persisted, unaddressed and unremedied. The inherent limitations of social audits include their ‘snapshot’ and ‘check-box approach’; the exclusion of workers in setting audit standards, and the structural inability of social audits to ensure workers can file complaints without fear of reprisal.
The briefing outlines legal strategies for increasing accountability between brands, workers and especially social auditing firms that are the lifeblood of a burgeoning $300 million industry. Strategies leverage tort law , contract law and civil lawsuits under the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act where victims of forced labor can sue social auditors for exploitation.
As the report mentioned, filing legal claims against social audit firms is, so far, a barely tested strategy in fashion. To date, only two legal claims have been brought forth but neither amounted to liability. One of which was a tort lawsuit filed in 2015 against a French auditing firm, Bureau Veritas, for its alleged part in