Janet Mensink, CEO of the Social & Labor Convergence Program, or SLCP, is happy to prove her naysayers wrong.
“There were quite a lot of critical stakeholders who thought we would never get anywhere,” she said of the Cascale spinoff’s somewhat rocky start, which stemmed from a desire by organizations such as the International Labour Organization’s Better Work program, Fair Trade U.S.A. and Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production to streamline costly, time-consuming and often duplicative social compliance assessments.
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Now in its fifth year of implementing the Converged Assessment Framework, better known as CAF, the multi-stakeholder initiative is hitting its stride, the SLCP’s third annual impact report said on Wednesday. The past year alone saw 9,230 facilities conduct the CAF, a 27 percent increase from the 7,250 the year before. This, the SLCP estimates, “unlocked” up to $26 million in potential savings from redundant audits that can be reinvested in better labor conditions for millions of workers.
While the bigger pool resulted in a 5 percent uptick in instances of legal non-compliance, repeat users were, on average, less likely to be in violation than newer ones, suggesting that the tool is empowering manufacturers to “take ownership” and improve workplace conditions, Mensink said. The trend also shows that factories that have invested in “thorough” management systems achieve a corresponding bump in performance. “These are the things that make me happy and make me feel proud,” she added. “We have proof of concept.”
It was time to split off from Cascale, formerly known as the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, Mensink said. The influential industry group was only meant to incubate the SLCP to drive convergence in the fashion industry. With the amount of progress the SLCP has made—more than 75 brands and organizations publicly accept SLCP data—plus a new five-year roadmap in place, it’s ready to further scale and diversify the supply chains it covers, Mensink said. The organization is also keen to emphasize the “multi” in “multi-stakeholder,” pulling in other standards holders, policymakers, academics and NGOs to better translate its aggregated data into more actionable steps.
“We feel having an independent, neutral MSI, based out of Europe, will provide us even more opportunities for that,” she said. “Right now we still want to continue adoption and scaling and uptake, but we also want to enable other stakeholders to use the data to drive improvement.”
With legislation breathing down the industry’s neck, it’s also important that the CAF remains “future proof” by keeping pace with the rapidly shifting regulatory landscape, Mensink said, adding that there will be at least a couple of updates to the platform in the next couple of years as the European Union rolls out its corporate social due diligence directive.
“The impact report is a bit of a teaser of all that we can evolve in so much more depth and breadth in the next five years,” she said. “And not just trying to focus on the uptake of the tool but also what can we do with it and what do we want to drive with it, which is decent working conditions.”
Mensink is aware of the growing backlash against social audits. Some have decried what can often be a superficial “box-ticking” exercise as little more than a fig leaf for brand reputations. Others point to the rampant fraud and corruption in the audit industry. In a congressional hearing about Uyghur forced labor in China earlier this month, Thea Lee, the U.S. Labor Department’s deputy undersecretary for international affairs, said that while social audits can be a useful tool to assess compliance at a “particular point in time,” they must be underpinned by a comprehensive social compliance system that champions trade unions, freedom of association and worker voice to be effective. And so far, those latter requirements are severely lacking in the labor space.
In some ways, the CAF is different from the typical social audit, Mensink said. The tool, she added, is for the public good, with facility ownership and a culture of “sharing credible data without punishment” at the “heart” of what the SLCP does. Last year, the organization launched the Worker Engagement Technology Program, allowing facilities to further involve workers in the assessment process. More than half of the factories assessed also involved workers’ representatives and/or workers in the self- or joint-assessment process, compared with less than one-quarter in 2022.
“We strongly believe that work engagement is a key factor,” Mensink said. Workers, she said, are an “additional source of data” that can confirm or counter the information coming from the verification itself, and sharing this with, say, trade unions on a local level, could generate insights on certain regions or specific topics. This is where the SLCP plans to double down over the next five years.
“We don’t claim that we’re perfect; there is still a lot that we need to do better,” Mensink said. Systemic change, in particular, is hard, she noted. And while the multi-stakeholder approach is the “right” way to do it, it’s not the fastest. The world is also facing unprecedented headwinds in terms of geopolitical turbulence and the effects of climate change, which in turn are causing supply chain disruptions and greater economic inequities.
“We need to have a systemic approach where everyone every stakeholder has their buy-in and we’re trying, in building our governance and on all different levels, to work with those principles,” she said. “But that does mean that sometimes you need to really take the time to listen to different people and come up with a solution that is a common-ground solution. It needs a lot of adjustments and re-validations and being willing to change and to improve.”
Still, Mensink thinks that the 2023 numbers show that the SLCP is “on the right track.” What’s needed now is greater uptake and acceptance of that common framework versus innumerable proprietary audits that have become a barrier to progress.
“I want to make it almost a call to action to everyone to join us in this effort because it is something that we should not be quarreling anymore on what’s the best tool,” she said. “But to move beyond that and put effort where it’s mostly needed in improvements and capacity building programs.”
