The Conservative Movement's ethical kosher supervision has yet to sign up a company, and its seal of ethical compliance is nowhere to be found.
Magen Tzedek is supposed to supervise the ethical aspects of doing business, similar to how kosher supervision companies, hechshers, supervise compliance with kosher food halakhot (Jewish laws).
But four years after its founding, Magan Tzedek still has no customers.
Why?
The Forward has an article that attempts to explain this.
But that Forward article doesn't mention many of the actual reasons Magen Tzedek has floundered.
Here's what the Jewish 'paper of record' missed:
1. The infighting in the Conservative Movement that slowed down Magen Tzedek's launch.
2. The extremely slow progress of the committee tasked with writing Magen Tzedek's guidelines. The ponderous process itself (rather than the difficulty of the actual task) is probably responsible for half of the delay.
3. The resistance of some Conservative rabbis and synagogues to Magen Tzedek's proposed standards prompted by many of those synagogues' own failure to meet those standards.
4. The economic crash which caused many companies to stop doing new untested things.
5. In retaliation for the the immigration raid on Agriprocessors and the government's successful prosecution of its VP, Sholom Rubashkin, on 86 bank fraud related charges, threats by haredi and Centrist Orthodox kosher supervisions to remove their supervision from the products of any company that adds a Magen Tzedek seal to its products. (Haredim view Magen Tzedek's founder, Rabbi Morris Allen, as a key player who supposedly convinced the government to 'persecute' Rubashkin and Agriprocessors – even though all the evidence shows that Allen was not in favor of the immigration raid and had nothing to do with Rubashkin's prosecution.)
6. A slew of news reports on the weakness of and the coming collapse of the Conservative Movement, which certainly did not inspire confidence in companies considering the Magen Tzedek seal.
What the Forward does get right is that it is difficult for companies to qualify for the Magen Tzedek seal. But that is true because Magen Tzedek requires not only complying with government laws governing workers rights but it also requires paying a living wage which is more money per hour than minimum wage, providing workers with certain benefits in excess of government minimums, and third party audits to confirm compliance. The Forward only lightly touches on this.
When Magen Tzedek was primarily Rabbi Morris Allen's project, relatively rapid progress was made. As soon as the Conservative Movement in effect took it over, that progress ground to a near standstill – just like much of the rest of the Conservative Movement is, essentially, in a standstill.
What has really stymied Magen Tzedek is the Conservative Movement itself.