Voices
tory that had a contract to make
100,000 pine dining sets a year
for Ikea using timber harvested in
the Russian Far East.
A sales manager at that plant
told me Ikea gave managers wide
purview to purchase wood as they
thought best. “Ikea will provide
some guidance, such as a list of endangered species we can’t use, but
they never send people to supervise
the purchasing,” the factory manager told me. “Basically, they just
let us pick what wood we want.”
Ikea had a range of well-intentioned policies in place. It did not
mean to use illegally harvested
logs, I’m willing to assume. But
the purchasing was simply too
vast and decentralized for the
company to fully monitor. At
least, not without deploying more
people to the scene, a step that
would cost the company money
— a cost presumably passed on
to those of us whose patios boast
Ikea dining sets. Instead, Ikea relied upon paperwork produced by
logging companies and factories.
And if the paperwork looked okay,
that box got checked off and the
product stream continued.
We need not understand the
complexities of global supply
chains to see how such a system
PETER S.
GOODMAN
HUFFINGTON
05.19.13
can go awry. Here in the United
States, the orgy of mortgage lending that culminated in a housing
bust, the worst financial crisis in
generations and then the Great
Recession all stemmed in large
part from people filling out paperwork as required while failing to
scrutinize reality. (And, yes, some
of the paperwork was bad, as the
robosigning scandal revealed, but
plenty of predatory lending, fore-
The global brands have
built a system designed to
inoculate themselves from
liability to disaster …”
closure and sticking of taxpayers
with terrible loans resulted from
files that were seemingly in order,
with required forms in place.)
Every time another garment industry disaster reveals the seamy
underside of this production,
major brands start talking about
their audit processes: “We know
that our goods are clean, because
we inspect the factories that make
them,” runs the script. “Buy our
products without guilt.”
But as workers have told me in
factories from China to Cambodia