In 2000, Tom Lewis founded Boston Harbour, a New York-based manufacturer of leather coats and jackets, as a one-man operation, but soon sought to expand the company overseas. Lewis traveled to China seeking factories that could meet his production needs.

Lewis knew that U.S. retailers would require proof that any factory producing goods for their stores was in compliance with international human rights guidelines, including a living wage for the workers, decent and safe working conditions, reasonable work hours, employee benefits and a ban on child labor.

At the same time, though, he knew that those same retailers routinely accept falsified documentation indicating that the factories were in compliance with human rights guidelines when, in fact, they were not.

With the cost of producing garments in China nearly equal to what U.S. retailers were willing to pay for those garments, it seemed the only way to make a profit on goods produced in Chinese factories was to turn a blind eye to widespread human rights abuses.

On his many visits to China, Lewis saw first hand the deplorable conditions and squalor in which many Chinese families lived. He felt compelled to find a way for Boston Harbour to do its part in remedying that situation as part of the company's contribution to the community in which Boston Harbour goods were being produced.

Inspired by fellow apparel company Phillips Van Heusen's methods of doing business with Chinese garment factories - requiring that those factories provided living wages, decent working conditions and a benefits package to every one of their workers - Lewis resolved that Boston Harbour would follow the PVH model in dealing with Chinese garment factories and their workers, believing it would increase factory workers' dedication to quality, result in fewer defective garments and significantly lower turnover.

Investing in product by investing in people

Over the past five years, Lewis has set into motion an ambitious effort to improve the lives of the workers in the Chinese factory whose capacity is almost solely dedicated to the production of Boston Harbour garments.

In addition to standards that call for paying a living wage, providing decent and safe working conditions, reasonable work hours, employee benefits and a ban on child labor, in 2007, Lewis began bringing health care professionals into the factory and giving workers access to basic medical services and information.

He also made simple changes to the factory's physical plant to improve the factory workers' personal, day-to-day work environment with additions including:

• Installing an eye-wash station, first-aid kit and liquid soap dispensers.
• Training workers in first aid and CPR.

While these additional modest improvements to the factory's physical plant may seem rudimentary in the eyes of American and European consumers, they are giant leaps forward for the typical Chinese factory worker.

Workers' response to the improvements was so positive that Lewis went even further. After learning that, in China, education is not free beyond the 10th grade and few can afford more education because tuition is typically a month's wages, he initiated a program to provide one child of one of the factory's workers with a college scholarship. In 2008, he expanded that program to include four college scholarships and 12 high school scholarships for the children of his factory's workers.

Although one might assume that strict adherence to human rights standards and Lewis's efforts to improve the personal and professional lives of the factory employees would reduce Boston Harbour's competitiveness, in 2007 Inc. magazine named Boston Harbour one of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in America. In addition, in recognition of his humanitarian efforts in China, Tom Lewis won Outerwear Magazine's Most Concerned Corporate Citizen Award in 2007 and 2008.

"We all need to be creative in our thinking, and we must all speak from a global/multinational perspective," Lewis says. "Each of us, in some way, however great or small, has a valuable contribution to make to the future of the new millennium."