Evaluating the Impact of SA 8000 Certification

The Social Accountability 8000 Standard (SA 8000), along with other types of certification standards and corporate codes of conduct, represents a new form of voluntary "private-governance" of working conditions in the private sector, initiated and implemented by companies, labor unions, and nongovernmental activist groups cooperating together. There is an ongoing debate about whether this type of governance represents real and substantial progress or mere symbolism. This paper reviews prior evaluations of private codes of conduct governing workplace conditions, including Ethical Trading Initiative's Base Code, Nike's Code of Conduct, and Fair Trade certification. The authors then discuss several best practices that should be employed in future evaluations of such codes of conduct. Key concepts include:

• An ongoing debate is raging about whether such codes represent substantive efforts to improve working conditions or are merely symbolic efforts that allow organizations to score marketing points and counteract stakeholder pressure by merely filing some paperwork.
• Evaluations designed with the features described in this paper will help introduce systematic evidence to these important debates. This could help identify which particular codes are best able to distinguish organizations possessing superior working conditions.
• Such evaluations may shed light on which elements of the codes are most effective, which types of monitoring systems represent best practices, and which areas are most in need of improvement.