David Barboza, a Shanghai-based NYTimes correspondent, wrote an eye-opening piece in last week’s Business section about the continued plight of sweatshop workers in China. He describes how even big U.S. corporations like Wal-Mart and Disney, often herladed as paradigms of social compliance, face difficulties keeping track of their supply chains.

In the article, Barboza shares a memorable excerpt from a National Labor Committee report that says, “At Wal-Mart, Christmas ornaments are cheap, and so are the lives of the young workers in China who make them.” Many NGOs, like the NLC, are publishing such honest and scathing reports to raise awareness of the hazardous labor conditions that persist in factories today. While there has been progress, the field of social compliance is a young one – just over a decade old – and further improvements must still be made. In one of my recent conversations with the social compliance director at a major American apparel company, she told me how some factories train their child laborers to hide when they hear a special kind of music as it signals an impending audit visit. Sadly, subversive tactics by factories are becoming increasingly commonplace. Bribery, inexperienced auditors, political leniency, and lack of standardization are just a handful of dilemmas that need to be better addressed for things to change. When they are, the tide will hopefully turn on anonymous factories and their abuse of workers.

Barboza ends his article on a somewhat disconcerting note. He affirms that some compliance problems Western companies can never solve and so the solution may simply be to leave China. Not necessarily. Nobody can deny the growing need for businesses to source their products overseas and nobody can deny the integral role that China plays here. For Western companies it is their responsibility to continue pushing back on shady suppliers. If this means being more transparent in information sharing about blacklisted factories with the public, so be it. Only then will factories start feeling the pressure to amend their seemingly complacent attitude towards social compliance. After all, nobody wants a repeat of last year’s Gap fiasco in India.

Read Barboza’s full article. To know more about social compliance matters, visit SAI, one of the leading organizations in the field.