Boohoo in doo-doo

Online retailer Boohoo is in the news for a lot of bad reasons. Allegations of poor working practices in supplier factories, which in turn are linked to a Covid outbreak in Leicester, come after news its had created a new incentive scheme for directors, which it did not put to a shareholder vote.

Much of the recent scrutiny of the company stems from a report issued by the campaign group Labour Behind The Label, which you can find here. Questions about poor working practices in Leicester, including illegal underpayment of the minimum wage, have been raised for years.

What I find interesting about the story is that the risk to the company and its investors from poor labour conditions was obvious. This is a sector where there have been numerous scandals and, as the FT article from 2018 shows, specific allegations of illegal practices in Leicester were not hard to find.

Boohoo even lists labour abuses as both operational and reputational risks in its annual report.

Well it was certainly right about the reputational risk... but if you read the list of mitigating actions / policies the company lists, you might well be reassured.

And it also says it applies "strict labour standards throughout our supply chain" in the blurb about its support for the SDGs.

The lesson here is pretty obvious - you cannot just go by what a company says about labour issues in its annual report. I don't think it's any great revelation that if you only listen to what companies say about themselves you get a very partial picture. Some companies do flat out lie, but more often it's simply the very human inability to be able to see their own flaws, or why others might have a different view. It's why I cannot buy into a model of employee engagement that doesn't involve real employee voice (which to me means unions, board representation etc) and think a model of shareholder engagement on labour issues that is restricted to investors talking to senior management is fundamentally ineffective.

Either some investors don't get this, or they don't care. Having done this kind of work for a long time, I'm afraid there are some investors out there who basically think labour is a cost and unions, labour law etc are barriers that they'd rather companies could avoid. They take a punt on companies with labour practices that they know to be poor because they can make money, and they are willing to look the other way.

(Coincidentally I have a small personal link to this as my dad's side of the family are from Leicester and his mum and dad used to work in a shoe factory there.)