This week, in the wake of recent discoveries of lead paint in toys and contaminated toothpaste, pet food and other products from China, the International Herald Tribune reported that large American toy and food retailers were “stepping up their analysis of imported goods that they sell”.

News coverage of tainted products from China reached a fever pitch in the late spring, with customers (including parents of children who love Thomas the Tank Engine toy trains) demanding companies do something to ensure the safety of the products they sell. As is often the case, it has taken a public outcry (based on investigative reporting) to light a fire under companies.

It is not a new thing that suppliers have been cutting corners on products to meet the growing demand for cheap goods. But the deaths of about 100 people in Panama from tainted Chinese cough medicine, and the deaths of dozens of cats and dogs in the U.S. from melamine-laced pet food made in China, have focused people’s minds.

Companies’ reactions included “making more unannounced visits to Chinese factories for inspections”. The implication is that corporations will crack down on their suppliers and get to the bottom of the contaminated products – whatever it takes to put consumers’ minds at ease and avoid the kind of disaster Panama experienced.

On the other hand, when companies’ suppliers have been found to have poor or even abusive labor conditions on the shop floor, the companies are more likely to claim they have little or no control over suppliers. This claim is less and less acceptable, and many large companies that source from developing countries do have at least a policy or labor code of conduct that is supposed to apply to overseas suppliers.

But those codes are more often honored in the breach. The majority of brand-name US companies (and even more non-brand-name companies) do not address labor abuses in their supply chains in a robust manner. While unannounced visits to factories are sometimes part of code implementation strategies, severe and widespread labor violations persist at supplier facilities of many companies: retailers, footwear, apparel, toys, electronics, auto parts.

The discovery of serious abuses at a factory – underage labor, forced overtime, or locked fire exits that lead to worker deaths when a fire breaks out – may cause a public outcry, but generally not the kind of scrambling by companies that we are now seeing. The simple truth is that when it is about consumer safety and the potential importation of dangerous products, companies will find a way to improve oversight of their supply chain. When it is about worker rights or worker safety at those same suppliers in China – or Honduras, or Lesotho - many companies say they will “look into it”. A few, but not enough, will do something concrete to address those labor abuses.

This is not a new question – labor rights groups have raised it for years – and we know the answer, but it needs to be asked again in the context of this new scandal around international supply chains. Why is it that a company knows exactly how to track down and eliminate an order of shirts that are missing a sleeve, but it will claim it has little control when five workers have lost fingers making shirts at the same factory? Why is it that a company will not tolerate lead paint in toy trains but it will tolerate workers wearing no personal safety gear while handling hazardous chemicals or operating dangerous machines?