Sol Mills does corporate social responsibility for a living, she works for CSCC. Originally named Cal Safety Compliance Corporation, it pioneered the concept of safety compliance inspections in the California apparel community. The company grew and changed its name to CSCC. Today CSCC provides corporate social responsibility consulting services to a variety of industries around the world, including garments and textiles, home furnishings, hard-lines, technology, cosmetics, toys, food processing, and agriculture.

Just to make sure, the following responses represent only the personal opinions of Ms. Mills and not of CSCC, the company.

Here's Sol...

What is your official job title? How long have you been working at CSCC?
My official job title is 'Special Programs Manager,' which is a catch-all for anything that falls outside the scope of our main services. I have been working with the company for about 2.5 years. CSCC's core business is conducting social assessments of sub-contracted or out-sourced manufacturing facilities such as factories or farms. The assessment looks at things like health and safety, wage payments, child labor, right to organize, etc. The criteria of the assessment vary depending on the client. Our clients are mainly large brands and retailers based in the U.S. and Europe. CSCC conducts about 14,000 assessments a year in over 130 countries; the majority of these assessments are conducted in China.

What's your average day like?
I really don't have an average day. One day I could be developing training materials for factory managers on human rights and why it makes good business sense to treat employees well, the next day I could be interviewing immigrant workers in a factory in New Jersey. Yesterday, for example, my entire day involved reviewing a report of an assessment conducted in Turkey for the Fair Labor Association. My work generally focuses on training and remediation for factories where we have found problems. I also manage various certification programs whereby factories can get a certificate of compliance with recognized human rights standards (such as Social Accountability 8000). Besides that, I generally try to keep up to date on trends in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) world.

You just came back from a work trip to Cambodia. Can you talk about it and your inspection there?
That was a very unique trip. We audited international child sponsorship agencies operating in Cambodia who are members of a pilot certification program in the U.S. The audit looked at their governance, ethical, and financial oversight mechanisms as well as their processes for entering, working in, and leaving communities. For example, we had to evaluate how they were ensuring the sustainability of their programs and whether they were engaging communities in their decision-making regarding programming. We also took into account how they were measuring the impacts of their programming and their effectiveness as an organization. We traveled to very remote areas and interviewed staff, villagers, and children.

If there was one thing that struck me most about the level of poverty – most of the rural population are subsistence farmers – it was the precariousness of people's livelihoods. One bad year of floods ruins entire crops of rice and destroys homes. The fact that climate change will affect the poorest people in the world the most, really hit home for me on that trip.

What do you like best about your job, and what keeps you up at night?
The fact that I never have an average day is great and definitely keeps me on my toes. I also like working with my foreign colleagues (mostly by email) in other countries, whether it's asking for help with a report from the trainer in Mexico, or providing information to an auditor in the Philippines, or sharing a joke with my counterpart in China, I feel truly lucky to work in such a global company.

What keeps me up at night is having too much work, but that's usually because I get interested in so many projects and, since my job title is so flexible, I tend to bite off more than I can chew.

Do you perceive particular challenges for women working in this line of work?
Actually, I think the majority of the employees in our company are female, at least in the US and Asia. We publish our diversity statistics by region: http://cscc-online.com/members/CSCC_UNGC_COP_2006.pdf

The women workers we interview in our assessments face many issues in the workplace. The majority of garment factory workers, especially in India and China, are young women. In the case of China, they may have migrated hundreds of miles from inland rural areas to work in factories in the south, and are therefore cut off from their families. In other cases, they may even migrate to another country where they don't speak the language. They often live in dormitories which can be cramped and even locked at night. They may be subject to pregnancy testing upon hire to determine their eligibility for employment and they may have to work excessively long hours in unsafe conditions for very little pay. Fortunately, some companies are pressuring their suppliers to improve these and other conditions.

What inspired you to pursue this line of work?
I began to get interested in CSR when I was working at Human Rights Watch in Los Angeles as a youth outreach coordinator. This led me to pursue a degree in human rights at Columbia University. Realizing I needed to specialize in something a little more specific, I found myself drawn towards classes, events, and literature on the intersection of business and human rights as business was my 'comfort zone' area having studied it in undergrad in the UK. Along the way, some brilliant people pointed me in the right direction, including Elya Tagar, the then President of the CSR club at Columbia; Anne Lally, who was then working with the Fair Labor Association; and Rev. David Schilling, who I was fortunate enough to have as a mentor one summer when I interned for him at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, a shareholder activist group based in New York.

What do you think all companies should aspire to do when it comes to just working conditions?
I think a holistic approach is necessary. For example, Nike is aiming to improve conditions in its supply chain by taking a look at how they make their purchasing decisions because often, human rights are paid lip service from one side of the corporation, while the other side sends these imperatives for price and speed down the supply chain which undermine the factory's ability to comply with international and even local labor standards. At the same time, we, as consumers, have to aspire to just working conditions and fair wages as well. We have to be more conscious about what we buy, why we're buying it and where it comes from and we should reward companies that are making progress in these areas.

What companies are on your personal "Best Of" list?
Well, this is a tough question. I think you would be surprised to know my answers would include Nike and Gap, previously the poster children for sweatshops, but those companies who were targeted earliest, have actually come the furthest in making their sourcing models more sustainable. Of course Patagonia, Stonyfield, and The Body Shop are on my list, and lately I've been buying my clothes from Fair Indigo (when I'm not combing through Salvation Army stores)! Timberland is great because despite all the wonderful things they are doing to help workers and measure their carbon footprint, they admit that they are still selling something people don't need. That's pretty enlightened.

I could go on and on about this. Below is a link to my work blog if anyone is interested in reading more:
http://cscc.typepad.com/responsiblesourcing/soledad_mills_special_programs_manager/index.html