Hi all,
Good to see the interest for this topic! Let me provide some further input in this discussion. I work in the Value Chain team and have been involved with Fairphone since the early days.
There are some assumptions mentioned that I feel overlook what Fairphone is about, i.e. a movement that uses a phone as a vehicle for change in the electronics industry. We started our journey together with the Fairphone community, not because we felt we had all the answers to ‘fairness’, but because we believe it should be possible to merge business with creating social and environmental value. We are learning by doing and use transparency to stimulate debate and challenge the industry.
This having said let me address some of the comments mentioned here and in the other thread about the Dashboard for FP audit results.
We value third-party assessments with suppliers a lot as a starting point in a collaborative effort for improvement, but for us it’s not the most valuable tool for systemic change at a workplace. We prefer to invest more resources in growing a direct relationship, to allow for a sincere exchange of information and for more tailored solutions for specific problems. We feel this way the management is more likely to admit the actual challenges they face and are more willing to work with us to address them.
Team members from the Amsterdam office regularly travel to Suzhou (on a monthly basis) and Mulan is stationed there permanently, which means we ‘blend in’ more naturally in the facility and the management doesn’t polish the workplace when we come, which I think is more likely to happen for third-party audits and verification. At the moment, this approach and our collaborative attitude towards suppliers is a big part of the innovation and transformation we want to bring in the industry.
There are many! Labels, certifications, industry codes, etc., but similar to audits and assessments, we see these as a tool for benchmarking, not a ‘checkbox’ or solution for many of the systemic social and environmental issues underlying our products. Fairphone therefore first pursued certification on a company level, instead of on the product level. Since May 2015, after an in-depth assessment of our company working methods, we received a B-Corp certification for social enterprises with a scorecard attached. The good thing about this is that it allows for ongoing improvement, which will be assessed by a third-party on a regular basis.
Aside from this, there are certifications and labels attached to our supply chain, for example the Hi-P facility in Suzhou has an ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification. and we’re connecting mines from the DRC and neighboring countries to our supply chain that are officially validated conflict-free. But in this way, a certification applies to a specific topic and in a specific situation and we feel it still requires an explanation or context when it comes to an electronic end product such as our Fairphone. More about our approach to certifications is in this blogpost.
Again a very valid point, but also not so straightforward to answer. Indeed some improvement activities we can literally appoint to be “in” our phone, for example we know that the printed circuit boards for Fairphone 2 are made using 35% recycled copper. But for many others, there is a more indirect connection.
Think about the conflict-free tin and tantalum, which we support by convincing Hi-P to source from sub-suppliers that we appoint, because they are part of the Conflict-Free Smelter Program. However, we learned that in these sub-suppliers, so-called ‘mass-balance’ takes place, meaning the tin and tantalum from Congo is mixed with other conflict-free material from non-conflict areas such as Australia.
This means we can’t guarantee that in every Fairphone 2, there is conflict-free tin from Congo. But by doing this, we are creating a better understanding and tools for more responsible sourcing within Hi-P and stimulating demand for those sub-suppliers that are part of these initiatives, which in turn helps them to buy bigger volumes from the Congolese mines. It gets the issue higher on the agenda and we’re creating connections between parties that are more responsible.
Thanks a lot for saying that the Fairphone 2 is the fairest, but we keep saying there is tons of work still to be done and we’re far from 100% fair. To put a label or stamp and claim that the phone is produced under acceptable working conditions, would simplify the actual problems at stake which can lead to quick fixes and Band-Aid solutions. Before there is peace in Congo, you will not hear me say that the working conditions underlying our phone are acceptable. We should aim for ongoing improvement.
We’re trying to report about our journey as much as we can on our website and we are aware that we can improve the way we structure and present it. Again, this is a learning and incremental process. “Hard facts” we get our hands on we publish, like assessment reports and additionally we prefer to show the human side that puts our activities in the local context by making videos amongst others. I agree there are more possibilities to explore for the community to verify things are ‘fairer’ which up to now is a balance of reports, audiovisuals and blog updates. We’re taking your comments into account once we’ll be revisiting our website infrastructure.
In sum, we want to provide deeper insights in our processes and I agree there could have been an earlier blog providing information about the status of Hi-P’s improvement plan and the efforts to address issues like working hours, temporary workers and worker representation (other than the one published last week). In the meantime we have picked other developments first to highlight, because we also want to balance our stories about ‘mining’, ‘design’, ‘manufacturing’ and ‘lifecycle’. There is so much to tell and as a small company, there are always choices to be made.
Sorry that this is again a long read, but I can’t make it look prettier or easier than it is ;-).
Thanks for reading!
Bibi