Social and Labor Convergence Program (SLCP) launching operations in India

The Social and Labor Convergence Program (SLCP) is an initiative led by the world's leading manufacturers, brands, retailers, industry groups, (inter)governmental organizations, service providers and civil society organizations, to eliminate audit fatigue by replacing current proprietary tools with a standard-neutral Converged Assessment Framework.

The mission of the SLCP is to improve working conditions by allowing resources that were previously designated for compliance audits to be redirected towards the improvement of social and labour conditions. In the first roll-out phase in late-May 2019, SLCP will launch operations in India as well as China, Sri Lanka and Taiwan.

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. 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 Cotton Textiles Export Promotion Council popularly known as Texprocil is organising the launch event for SLCP in Mumbai on 5th June and Dr K V Srinivasan, Chairman Texprocil welcomed the launch of the SLCP in India at various other centres also like Delhi, Bengaluru, and Tirupur.

He said that 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 particularly the launch event in Mumbai, he added.

The SLCP is not a code of conduct or compliance program. 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 existing audit systems and codes of conduct. This means that the same data set can be used by a wide-range of stakeholders and interpreted according to their interests and criteria. This eliminates the need for repetitive audits to be carried out on the same facility.

Findings from research conducted by SLCP in 2018 show that adoption of SLCP could unlock resources worth over $1.5 million spent on duplicative audits in 2019 alone, rising to $200 million by 2023, for re-deployment to improve working conditions.[1]

The SLCP launch will be organized by Shahi Exports in Bengaluru on May 30 and by AEPC in Tirupur and Delhi on June 3 and June 7 respectively.

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