Can better data drive better working conditions in the garment industry? The Social & Labor Convergence Program and the Fair Wear Foundation think so.
The two Amsterdam-based nonprofits revealed Wednesday that Fair Wear will be using the SLCP’s harmonized social audit data to promote human rights due diligence implementation while minimizing the dreaded “audit fatigue” that stems from too many duplicative social compliance assessments.
This isn’t your typical Memorandum of Understanding, a non-legally binding instrument that might suggest alignment on certain issues but doesn’t necessarily lead to meaningful change, the organizations said. For one thing, they have been working together “behind the scenes” for the past three years, meaning that the agreement is not so much a start but a formalized “milestone,” said Janet Mensink, the SLCP’s CEO. For another, the SLCP and Fair Wear believe that step improvements are no longer enough. In short, it’s systemic change or bust.
“Even after 25 years of talking about improving labor conditions, there is still a lot to do,” Mensink said. “We have made some progress but if you look at the reality, there are still a lot of conditions that are way below minimum requirements and international labor standards.”
Reliable data has become more indispensable with the rise in mandatory due diligence legislation, particularly in Europe. If the industry’s biggest stakeholders don’t converge, she said, “we are just busy doing all these duplicative and confusing things. You’re not speaking the same language.” What this also means is that everyone is frittering away time and money without addressing any underlying problems, Mensink added.
Fair Wear members, which include Armedangels, Jack Wolfskin and Vaude, already use the SLCP’s Converged Assessment Framework, or CAF, which has rolled out in 11,000 facilities in more than 60 countries to “unlock” roughly $23 million in savings that can be invested in workplace improvements. The same data will now feed into Fair Wear’s HRDD Facilitation Hub, a due diligence platform that brands can use to map legal reporting requirements and flag risk hotspots.
“We can use an aggregated analysis of SLCP data to show what are the most likely and severe risks in a particular country, especially for the countries where Fair Wear does not have our own teams and stakeholder network [on the ground],” said Annabel Meurs, associate director at Fair Wear. “This will allow brands to do their country risk scoping, and that then translates into the nature of the assessments that they do on the factory level.”
Integrating CAF and treating it the same way Fair Wear does with its own brand assessments also triggers the “same cycle of mitigation, prevention and remediation” that both organizations can track and validate, Meurs said. The idea is to “close the loop” on due diligence so that improvements and remedies don’t slip into the cracks, especially at a time when democratic spaces in sourcing countries like Bangladesh and Myanmar have shrunk to the point where they’re virtually nonexistent. This, too, will be its own challenge.
Social audits have come under fire for being hurried box-checking exercises that capture specific moments in time rather than a full picture of a facility’s conditions—that is, when they’re not tainted by outright fraud and corruption from the get-go. Mensink and Meurs say this is why worker voice and the inclusion of employee representatives are so critical to the outcomes of their risk scoping, which the organizations have based on the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct framework.
“So if you know in country X or a region or a specific facility that freedom of association is not respected or there is no collective bargaining or no functioning grievance mechanism in the factory, that means your due diligence actions are different and guided by that specific risk,” Meurs said. “We find that due diligence data is the most credible if it is locally owned and validated data…complemented with the perspectives of unions.”
Mensink said that the SLCP has used feedback to hone the CAF, though she admits there’s more work to do. She said that Fair Wear has been a “critical friend,” one that continues to “keep us on our toes” to ensure that its data is credible in all aspects, including local ownership and accountability.
Serving data aside, the SLCP and Fair Wear will be working together on policy and industry engagement so that their shared pursuit of convergence is that much stronger, said Meurs, who joined the SLCP’s supervisory board in January. It was with a similar imperative that Fair Wear entered a “strategic collaboration” with Cascale, the multi-stakeholder group formerly known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, in April. The SLCP itself spun out of Cascale in February. Where all this aligning will lead and how success will be measured are questions that still need to be answered.
Meanwhile, Mensink wants to invite other multi-stakeholder initiatives and standard holders to follow Fair Wear’s example, if only to advance the needs of the collective. “Because this idea of convergence and seeking complementarity also requires that you put your [long-term] vision above the core short-term business model or strategic aims of your organization,” she said.