NEW YORK — Lee Scott, the former chief executive officer of Wal-Mart Stores, called on attendees at the CIES World Food Business Summit here on Friday to join the Global Social Compliance Program to help ensure that suppliers are adhering to local wage and environmental regulations.
The program, which was started by CIES but is now being taken over by its successor organization, the Consumer Goods Forum, involves sharing factory audits to create a database of socially responsible suppliers.
"We should not be rewarding factories that cheat on overtime, that cheat on the age of their labor, that dump their scraps and their chemicals in our rivers, and don’t pay their taxes and cheat on their contracts," he said. "If factories cheat on their communities and their obligations, they will cheat on the quality of their products, and in the end they will cheat our customers."
Scott, who retired as CEO earlier this year, remains chairman of the executive committee at Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart.
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