Corporate accountability is not popular

professor Prakash Sethi

Toys are in the air and many of the mainstream media carry stories about the labor conditions in China. The New York Times has an original story by detailing the difficult life of business professor Prakash Sethi, who did not earn a lot of gratitude from China-based manufacturers with his proposals to improve labor conditions in China.

He has suggested that multinational companies with manufacturing bases in China and elsewhere not merely raise the pathetically low wages of their factory employees but also pay them restitution for years past. When asked why more companies don’t take steps to monitor wages and working conditions, he once answered “bigotry.” This sort of bluntness makes it less than completely surprising that the I.C.C.A. doesn’t have a long list of clients for its monitoring services. “I don’t work with very many companies,” Sethi says equably. “They don’t want me.”