In the 90s, under criticism for their practices, companies began to produce their own corporate codes of conduct. Some members of the White House task force on sweatshop issues published an accord in November. The corporate-funded Council on Economic Priorities has its SA8000. In Canada and Europe, others are at work on the issue. Sweatshop workers who organize for their own rights do so in a vastly unequal power relationship.
Corporations are free to move their production in order to avoid dealing with unions.
Increasingly, that movement is into countries where union activity faces government repression. In response to this unequal relationship, codes offer the promise of holding companies accountable to certain baseline standards, regardless of where they produce. While such codes can serve a valuable purpose, the best code is a collective bargaining agreement arising from good-faith negotiations between management and a democratic, participatory union independent of government and freely selected by the workers it represents. In collective bargaining, a union may propose pay rates or raise other demands which exceed the standards established by codes to which a company may be a signatory. It should be a feature of any adequate code that failure by the company or its contractors to negotiate such demands in good faith will be considered a violation of the code.