This week I wrote an opinion piece about an SQF-certified company cited by the US Dept. of Labor for hiring children to clean slaughterhouses. Despite that being a practice we can all agree is terrible, I really bungled the article otherwise.
I attempted to draw a line between the SQF certification issued by the body AIB and some violation of ISO 17065, for which AIB is accredited. It was a stretch, and I noted as much in the article. But I undermined the entire point when I claimed, in a clearly overcaffeinated rant, that AIB was somehow involved in “corrupt practices.”
I’m usually very, very careful when I use that word, and in this case, I just full-on bungled it. There was no “corruption” here, and — as I originally stated in the piece — it was unlikely that any CB (including AIB) would have identified the child labor practices during an SQF audit, since it’s entirely out of scope. The company wasn’t using children at the physical site audited by AIB, so it’s not like they would have seen kids walking around during their audit.
So I want to apologize to AIB for this one. There were no accreditation violations or corruption on their part here. I’ve pulled down the articles entirely because (again) it was just really poor writing on my part.
About Christopher Paris
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 30 years' experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the author of Surviving ISO 9001 and Surviving AS9100. He reviews wines for the irreverent wine blog, Winepisser.
