The Social & Labor Convergence Program (SLCP) is launching its operations in India, China, Sri Lanka and Taiwan. Series of launch events will take place across India in partnership with export promotion councils like The Cotton Textiles Export Promotion Council (Texprocil), Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC) and India’s biggest apparel manufacturer Shahi Exports.
In India, it will be launched at various apparel manufacturing hubs like Delhi, Bangalore and Tirupur.
To eliminate audit fatigue by replacing current proprietary tools with a standard-neutral Converged Assessment Framework, SLCP is an initiative led by various industry stakeholders like world’s leading manufacturers, brands, retailers, industry groups (inter)governmental organisations, service providers and civil society organisations. SLCP started two years ago, with its head office at The Netherlands.
The Converged Assessment Framework is a tool developed by the SLCP which provides a data set with no value judgement or scoring. It is, however, compatible with the existing audit systems and codes of conduct. This means that the same data set can be used by a wide range of stakeholders & interpreted according to their interests and criteria. This eliminates the need for repetitive audits to be carried out on the same facility.
The benefits of SLCP for facilities are that it addresses audit fatigue by reducing the number of social audits and facilitates measuring of employment practices, thus improving working conditions and employee relations.
Besides, it also redeploys resources towards improvement actions and fosters trust and collaboration between supply chain partners.
SLCP will be holding a series of free one-day seminars in four centres to introduce facilities and their business partners to the SLCP process.
“The issues of Social and Labour Compliance become highly relevant in industries which are labour-intensive, and the textile and clothing industry is one such sector. Texprocil is privileged to be associated with the SLCP operations launch in India,” Dr. K. V. Srinivasan, Chairman Texprocil