A guiding pillar of Global Fashion Agenda’s work is the commitment to creating respectful and secure work environments, ensuring that universal human rights are upheld for everyone employed throughout the value chain.

We are pleased to partner with the Social & Labor Convergence Program (SLCP) to contribute expert insights on this priority. We spoke to Janet Mensink, CEO at SLCP to hear more about their latest milestones.

How is your organisation fostering a net positive industry and creating impact through its partnership with Global Fashion Agenda?

SLCP fosters a net positive industry through our targeted mission of deploying a Converged Assessment Framework (CAF) that delivers harmonised, accessible and trusted data. Partnering with GFA has supported us to create impact by amplifying the call to action to the industry to ditch duplicative and repetitive social audits and to adopt the CAF. By joining forces with influential and respected actors such as GFA, we have begun to shift the dial when it comes to the approach to social auditing. There is growing acceptance and awareness that proprietary audits are a burden on manufacturers and hinder industry collaboration. This is evidenced through the growing use of the CAF, which has grown 20-fold since its launch in 2019. 88% of respondents to the 2023 Better Buying Institute’s Purchasing Practices Index confirmed that their buyers now accept existing audits, demonstrating that this is now widely understood to be a best practice in terms of purchasing practices. Having the opportunity to promote convergence through GFA’s channels and events has helped SLCP to reach a wider audience, and we are thrilled to share that there are now over 90 brands publicly committing to accepting SLCP data from their suppliers.

What does your latest research tell us about the current state of ‘Respectful and Secure Work Environments’ in the industry?

As the number of SLCP assessments continue to grow, we are increasingly well-positioned to share insights and analysis on the current state of working conditions in global supply chains, which is particularly relevant to the topic of Respectful and Secure Work Environments. Our 2023 Impact Report shows that overall legal non-compliances have risen 5% year on year, suggesting that there is still urgent work to do to improve working conditions. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) had a higher average of legal non-compliances than larger facilities, suggesting that further support is needed to improve conditions for smaller businesses in particular. Health and safety remains the area with the most non-compliances overall. Without fundamental safety in the workplace, we cannot achieve broader sustainability goals, nor can we increase supply chain resilience or profitability.

What does an ideal future for the industry look like in your impact area, and how will you support this vision?

As a starting point, we need to see further convergence of social assessments. The rise in human rights due diligence legislation is only increasing the urgency of convergence in order to limit the risk of legal requirements increasing the reporting burden on manufacturers. We need therefore to see more brands and retailers move away from their proprietary audit schemes and, even more importantly, for more standard holders to converge with SLCP. We want to see the CAF become the primary tool used for collecting social and labour data at a facility level; this still leaves plenty of scope for standard holders to offer their own expertise and value-added services to support end-users to use the social and labour data effectively. We are working hard to engage standard holders and other stakeholders to encourage this collaboration, and thus to shift further resources away from auditing and towards improvement activity.

Overall, of course, our ultimate vision for the future is one of decent working conditions for all. We hope to contribute to this by providing the industry with the actionable and credible data needed to accelerate and target improvement activities. We believe our data can play an important role in informing stakeholders from brands and manufacturers to civil society and policy makers.

For the latest insights on Respectful & Secure Work Environments download The GFA Monitor 2024 here.

Janet Mensink, CEO, Social & Labor Convergence