Three leading organisations have signed a new memorandum of understanding (MoU) to strengthen their collaboration in jointly addressing workers’ grievances from shared factories of their various member brands.
- The three organisations are Amfori, Fair Wear, and Bündnis für nachhaltige Textilien (Partnership for Sustainable Textiles - PST).
- This collaboration will initially be piloted for a year, with the objective to improve working conditions in our members’ supply chains and to offer learnings for the industry to align access to remedies.
- Thereafter, learnings and feedback received from various stakeholders during the first year will form the basis for evaluation and adaptation of the collaboration protocol.
- Although Amfori, Fair Wear and PST are the first to sign the MoU, sometime last week, it is open for other like-minded organisations to join and learn from this shared experience.
The objectives: Production sites where multiple member brands, from different member organisations, source from, offer unique opportunities to pool resources and make a joint impact. With this in mind, and to integrate efforts and avoid overlap, the three organisations agreed to work together to jointly address complaints raised in shared factories. The objectives are to:
- support member brands and their suppliers in resolving complaints,
- align approaches and standards,
- strengthen collaboration among stakeholders, and
- provide better (access to) remedy for workers.
Other highlights: This new initiative will also help provide a space to test such collaboration between operators of grievance mechanisms, find synergies and align complaint handling, including investigation and remediation steps, across the industry.
- The three organisations—in consultation with their main stakeholders—have drawn up a protocol setting out the scope, terms and processes for implementing this collaboration.
- The protocol does not replace any of the organisations’ complaints mechanisms but serves as an additional “instrument” to escalate incoming complaints whose resolution could benefit from such a collaborative approach.
- While any grievance raised through a channel of the participating organisations may be covered by the collaboration protocol, complaints that are more complex in nature and where the additional leverage and resources provided by the collaboration would allow for better remediation, are more likely to be escalated.
The backdrop: The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) strongly recommends in its Accountability and Remedy Project III that “operators of non-State-based grievance mechanisms cooperate proactively and constructively with each other in order to raise standards and promote good practice with respect to the resolution of grievances arising from business-related human rights harms.”
- In global garment supply chains, brands are likely to source from the same suppliers and/or factories.
- Those brands are often part of member organisations that seek to promote the improvement of working conditions in supply chains by providing (non-judicial) grievance mechanisms.
