SMETA's four pillars — two mandatory, two only in a 4-pillar audit.
SMETA (Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit) is a methodology, not a certification — the report gets shared through the Sedex platform rather than issued as a pass/fail badge. A 2-pillar audit covers Labour Standards and Health & Safety, the two mandatory areas for any SMETA engagement. A 4-pillar audit adds Environment and Business Ethics, and is increasingly what major global buyers require as a pre-qualification condition, not an optional extra.
The labour standards pillar is the core of the whole audit: working hours, wages, child and forced labour, freedom of association, discrimination and disciplinary practice, benchmarked against the Ethical Trading Initiative base code. Health & safety covers fire safety, machine guarding, chemical handling and emergency preparedness. On-site time typically runs one to three days depending on facility size and pillar scope, and Sedex treats a report as expired after 24 months regardless of how clean the findings were.
The practical trap buyers fall into is treating a SMETA report as a permanent stamp of approval. It's a snapshot of one site on one set of audit days — conditions can and do drift afterward, particularly under order-volume pressure. A report nearing its 12-month re-audit point deserves the same scrutiny as one that's already expired.
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