SLCP welcomes agreement on landmark EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD)
The Social & Labor Convergence Program (SLCP) is pleased to see the final political agreement of the European Union’s CSDDD. This significant development marks a crucial step forward in improving responsible business conduct globally, particularly for workers in the value chain.
The CSDDD will require companies to conduct human rights and environmental due diligence in their own operations, their subsidiaries, and in their value chain. This Directive should be a starting point for stakeholders to further their existing efforts to identify, address, prevent and mitigate harms through meaningful due diligence practices.
Addressing human rights harms requires a smart-mix of measures, which include mandatory legislation such as the CSDDD. Likewise, proper stakeholder engagement with workers, multi-stakeholder solutions, and collecting independently-verified social and labor data will be critical to conducting meaningful due diligence. SLCP remains committed to working with the EU institutions, sourcing country governments, and its supply chain actors to ensure we fulfil our role by providing a practical supporting measure that is available to all and reduces audit fatigue.
Janet Mensink, Executive Director at Social & Labor Convergence Program, is optimistic about the opportunities the Directive presents: "We are excited to welcome this landmark legislative development, and support companies as they embark on this journey towards a more sustainable and socially responsible supply chains. This Directive reinforces the existing international frameworks, and reflects not only our mission and vision, but the collective ambition of achieving better outcomes for workers in global supply chains. SLCP stands ready to support companies to not only meet compliance, but go beyond in implementing meaningful HRDD.”
We look forward to supporting our stakeholders in implementing CSDDD by:
1. Working with our signatories and policymakers to ensure the Converged Framework Assessment (CAF) remains ready to support HRDD implementation,
2. Clearly outlining SLCP’s value-add for HRDD through the HRDD Toolkit, that will be updated in 2024 to reflect the expectations set in the CSDDD,
3. Continuing to ensure SLCP is a ‘fit’ MSI for supporting HRDD,
4. Providing evidence-based insights based on SLCP data to policymakers,
5. Educating suppliers in understanding our role in supporting HRDD,
6. Ensuring that by scaling the Data Collection tool, there is positive impacts as a result of reducing audit duplication, and the unlocked resources can be reinvested into improvement programs.
