The Adidas hotline: another activist more interested in attacking the buyers than the problems that plague the developing world?

Adidas announced on May 6 it was rolling out its programme of soliciting direct worker feedback about working conditions. 

Within seconds, the media had found a rent-a-quote activist to savage the idea. "The SMS is a drop in the ocean and quite ridiculous" said Maike Pflaum from the charity Romero. Adidas, he said, should focus on improving production standards.

But how are they going to do that without listening to workers? Through ill-designed monitoring agencies, whose inability to check conditions gets lost in a forest of incomprehensible management-speak? Through “activist” groups, who constantly distort what workers say to suit their own agendas? Or through their own country representatives, who are inevitably over-worked and more concerned with ensuring factories are producing goods to time, budget and specification?

The Web and mobile phones offer buyers the opportunity to manage working conditions in the independently-run offshore factories they use these days as they used to when they made at home. One obvious drawback is that managing the feedback made possible by mobile phones is a problem: like too many worker suggestion programmes businesses operate, the idea works only when there are lots of worker reactions – but handling large amounts needs careful planning. There’s just one answer to that: thorough pre-design and slow, methodical, properly resourced, roll-outs.

The initial stages do little useful except tell management how to organise such initiatives. If Romero is criticising the small scale of the trial, he’s merely showing his inexperience of serious management.

But he sounds as if he’s saying something more substantial: that Adidas shouldn’t be inviting workers’ views. Does he really believe Adidas should carry on ignoring workers’ insights into their working conditions? Or is he simply trying to protect a monopoly on direct contact with workers his activist group thinks it’s entitled to?

Most sensible advocates of worker rights start off by pointing out how rarely worker grievances get through to buyers. When an activist attacks an attempt by a buyer to listen to those grievances, we have to ask what he’s an activist for: better worker welfare, or just damaging well-meaning businesses.

Too often in worker rights debates, it’s clear that many activists are more interested in demonising Walmart than advancing workers’ welfare. The speed with which the media can find activists to badmouth any idea that didn’t come from one of their own kind is a depressing indication of how many false friends poor country workers attract