A practical glossary for responsible sourcing work.

Being able to show accurate records and explain how the process really works when someone asks.

Without audit readiness, good controls may be hard to verify and bad controls may be hidden behind last-minute document assembly. Review quality drops quickly when the evidence trail is weak.

A documented plan showing what will be fixed, who owns it, when it is due, and what evidence will prove the issue is actually resolved.

CAP quality is one of the clearest indicators of whether the program is solving problems or only documenting them. Weak CAPs usually lead to vague closure, repeated findings, and slower escalation.

The creation, editing, or selective use of records to hide what really happened in recruitment, payroll, working hours, safety, or remediation.

Once record integrity is in doubt, audit findings, CAP closure, and commercial decisions become less reliable. Teams may have to challenge other evidence that would normally be accepted.

An incident that could have caused serious harm or escalation but was stopped before the worst outcome happened.

Programs that track near misses can see patterns earlier than programs that wait only for confirmed incidents, severe findings, or worker injury.

A finding that shows a site, supplier, or process did not meet a stated requirement in a code, standard, law, or customer expectation.

This is the basic unit of review and remediation work. How a team classifies, groups, and prioritizes non-conformities determines what gets escalated, what enters a CAP, and what becomes a severe-issue case.

The work of fixing the problem, addressing harm, and reducing the chance that the same issue happens again.

This is where responsible sourcing becomes real. Audits and investigations only matter if they lead to changes that reduce harm and prevent recurrence.

The process of finding out why a problem happened so the response fixes the underlying control failure, not just the visible symptom.

Without root-cause analysis, CAPs often default to cosmetic actions such as retraining or restating the policy. That closes the file without changing the system that created the issue.

A structured review of workplace conditions and controls against labor, ethics, health and safety, and related expectations.

Audits still sit at the center of many responsible sourcing programs, so teams need to know what they are good at: identifying visible gaps, creating a findings record, and starting corrective action.

A severe issue that requires immediate escalation and cannot stay in routine corrective-action follow-up.

These findings show whether the organization can move from policy language into real incident response. Teams have to protect workers, decide who gets involved, and make consequence decisions quickly.

The controls that make worker housing safe, decent, and reviewable, including sanitation, space, fire safety, privacy, and grievance access.

Dormitory failures can be an early warning sign of broader management weakness, especially where migrant workers are dependent on employer-linked housing or transport.

The controls that keep a site physically safe, such as fire protection, machine guarding, lockout procedures, maintenance, incident response, and worker reporting.

Worker safety gaps are among the fastest ways for a program to face severe findings, reputational damage, and urgent worker-protection decisions.

Work extracted through coercion, threats, debt, withheld documents, or other conditions that stop a worker from leaving freely.

Forced labor is one of the clearest zero-tolerance issues in the field. Even one credible case changes how quickly the team should escalate, investigate, and protect workers.

A worker's ability to move, resign, travel, or leave the workplace and housing arrangement without coercive restriction.

If workers cannot leave freely, complain safely, or recover their documents, many other controls become less credible. The worker may appear compliant because the environment is coercive.

A small response team for serious complaints that cannot stay in the normal hotline or grievance queue.

Without clear ownership, serious complaints can slip between compliance, sourcing, legal, and local management. A task-force structure helps the company move faster and reduce contradictory decisions.

A trusted way for workers or affected people to raise concerns and seek response or remedy outside of scheduled audits.

Audits miss issues, especially problems tied to abuse, retaliation, discrimination, recruitment, or day-to-day supervisor behavior. A working grievance mechanism gives workers another route to surface those issues earlier.

The rule that workers must not be punished for raising concerns, joining a complaint, or cooperating with an investigation.

Without visible non-retaliation protection, grievance systems and worker interviews become much less reliable because workers learn that speaking up is unsafe.

Information from workers about what conditions are really like, gathered through channels such as interviews, surveys, committees, or complaints.

Programs that rely only on audits and management records often overestimate the strength of controls. Worker voice can reveal hidden recruitment abuse, retaliation, supervisor pressure, or grievance failure that documents miss.

A change in contract terms after recruitment or arrival that leaves the worker with worse wages, role, hours, fees, or conditions than originally promised.

Contract substitution undermines worker trust and can turn a recruitment process that looked compliant on paper into a severe labor-rights issue in practice.

The rule that the employer, not the worker, bears the cost of recruitment.

This principle matters because debt from recruitment fees is one of the clearest pathways into coercion, dependency, and forced-labor risk.

A third party that recruits, places, or manages workers for an employer and can add serious risk if its role is opaque or poorly controlled.

Labor agents are a common entry point for worker-paid fees, contract substitution, document retention, and deceptive recruitment.

A worker who has moved across regions or borders for work and may face added contract, language, housing, and recruitment risks.

A program can look acceptable on paper and still miss severe risk if migrant workers are processed through labor agents, different contracts, or isolated housing arrangements.

A recruitment approach that prevents worker-paid fees, deceptive contracts, unsafe migration pathways, and retaliation against workers who raise concerns.

Recruitment is often where severe labor risk begins. If the hiring pathway is weak, the site may inherit debt, deception, document risk, and coercion before ordinary workplace controls even come into play.

Money or costs workers are charged to get or keep a job, such as agent fees, visa costs, transport advances, or document-processing charges.

These fees increase the risk of coercion, contract substitution, and forced labor because the worker may feel unable to leave or complain without losing money that cannot be recovered.

The repeated cycle of fixing problems, learning from them, and strengthening controls so the same issues happen less often over time.

Without continuous improvement, even a detailed audit and CAP process eventually becomes repetitive paperwork. The same issues keep coming back because the underlying controls are not changing.

The set of owners, routines, controls, records, and review meetings that makes supplier requirements work day to day.

Management systems are what reduce repeat findings over time. They matter because they show whether the site can prevent issues, detect them early, and keep corrective actions from fading out after the audit.

The document that tells suppliers the baseline rules they are expected to follow on topics like wages, working hours, health and safety, forced labor, ethics, and subcontracting.

When a team asks 'what standard did the supplier fail to meet?', the code is often where that answer starts. It gives internal teams and suppliers one shared reference point.

The recurring way a buyer explains expectations, updates suppliers, and makes sure managers and workers understand what the rules mean in practice.

Strong standards often fail at implementation because no one translated them into real operating behavior. Training and communication are what make the code usable on the ground.

A factory location the buyer has specifically cleared for production.

Approved-factory control is one of the clearest ways a company narrows visibility risk. It tells the supplier that production cannot happen wherever capacity happens to exist.

A country the brand allows for production under its sourcing rules.

Country restrictions are one of the clearest examples of a brand turning risk appetite into an operating rule. They change where suppliers can produce, how changes are reported, and what gets escalated.

The ability to identify where products, materials, sites, and suppliers are in the supply chain well enough to make real decisions about risk and control.

Without traceability, teams struggle to investigate allegations, map high-risk tiers, or explain what the program actually covers. The company may have policies and audits but still not know where the real exposure sits.

Production moved to a non-disclosed or non-approved facility outside the brand's authorized supplier chain.

When production moves outside the approved chain, a company can lose visibility very quickly. The original site's good score may tell you little about the actual place making the product.

A cost breakdown that shows whether the quoted price really covers wages, overtime, benefits, and the labor controls the supplier is expected to maintain.

This term matters because weak purchasing decisions often show up first in labor conditions. If the price only works through extreme overtime, underfunded staffing, or skipped controls, the risk moves back into the factory.

How a buyer stops or reduces business with a supplier without making the situation worse for workers.

Exit is one of the hardest decisions in responsible sourcing because a fast commercial answer can create unintended harm for workers if it is handled carelessly.

The way a buyer decides when to support a supplier, when to push harder, and when to reduce or end business.

A supplier can receive a strong CAP request from compliance and the opposite signal from the commercial team if SRM is weak. That inconsistency slows remediation and confuses expectations.

A joint ILO-IFC program in garment-producing countries that assesses factories, helps them improve, trains people on the ground, and publishes recurring labor findings.

Better Work matters because it can give teams a richer picture than a one-off audit. It helps place one factory's findings inside a broader pattern of repeated issues, country context, and improvement over time.

The ongoing cycle of spotting risk, deciding what needs attention first, acting on it, and checking whether the response worked.

Many programs have audits, policies, and dashboards but still lack true due diligence because none of that information reliably changes what gets prioritized, supported, escalated, or stopped.

The practice of deciding what to review, support, or escalate first based on the level of risk rather than treating every supplier or issue the same.

Most programs do not have enough time, leverage, or budget to treat every issue equally. Prioritization is what keeps attention on the problems most likely to cause serious harm or repeated failure.