Multistakeholder Initiatives Project

or "Joint Initiative on Corporate Accountability and Workers' Rights"

ETI Other activities

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Introduction to Project

A unique opportunity now presents itself to significantly scale-up impact. While the six multistakeholder code initiatives involved in the project has similar or complementary aims and aspirations, approaches have differed. This divergence of approach has been extremely valuable in generating an enormous amount of learning. If this learning is now shared and consolidated, and based on this best practice agreed (as far as possible), there is the potential to make a significant contribution through such a collaborative effort.

Complementary approaches may increase the impact of the multi-stakeholder organisations both individually and collectively. A number of common interest areas for potential collaboration have already emerged, these include: building relationships with stakeholders in production countries, country background studies, factory assessments and complaints procedures.

A complementary approach may also have the potential to go some way to addressing the confusion that the proliferation of voluntary codes of conduct, and processes for their implementation, has generated. While brands and retailers are the major cause of multiple factory assessments, there is also some overlap among the internal and external monitoring of companies affiliated with more than one of the multi-stakeholder groups (even though the pilots, certification factory assessments and external monitoring themselves overlap little).

A complementary approach by the multi-stakeholder initiatives should provide the brands and retailers with the potential for consolidating their approaches (if they wish), cutting down on duplication of effort and freeing resources to invest in improved standards.

Collaboration will also enable joint and pooling of existing research into commonly identified issues (for example complaints mechanisms, living wage etc.), preventing duplication and ensuring resources, both financial and human, are utilised to secure improvement in the lives of workers, rather than being channelled into factory inspection alone.

Project aims and objectives

The project aims:

• to maximise the effectiveness and impact of the multi-stakeholder organisations by ensuring that resources are directed as efficiently as possible to improving the lives of workers and their families; and
• ‘to develop and test closer cooperation between the multistakeholder organisations and ensure resources are directed as efficiently as possible through shared learning’.

The objectives of the project are:

• to identify the compatibility between different multi-stakeholder organisations and define how they can most effectively work together
• to agree, to the extent possible, best practice in application of codes of conduct through pooling the experience of all six organisations to test out different methodologies
• to identify the roles local stakeholders can play in implementing codes of conduct
• to improve conditions and observance of labour rights for garment workers and their families, in a specified location
• to disseminate lessons from the experience (both process and content)
• to demonstrate to companies the complementarity between different initiatives and encourage companies to work with the multi-stakeholder organisations
• to identify areas for future collaboration

Key achievements and challenges

• Agreement in Principle to work together – February 2003
• Garments identified as focus sector – February 2003
• Steering Committee established - May 2003
• Independent Chair appointed - May 2003
• Terms of Reference for the project agreed – May 2003
• Proposal submitted to US State Department – July 2003
• Second Steering Committee Meeting – August 2003
• Turkey agreed as focus country – August 2003

Plans

For further information on the project and achievements to date, please visit the project website:
www.jo-in.org.

Who is involved?

Clean Clothes Campaign
Ethical Trading Initiative
Fairwear Foundation
Fair Labor Association
Social Accountability International
Workers Rights Consortium

For further information contact:

Sebastian van der Vegt: vandervegt@jo-in.org.

Website: www.jo-in.org.

 

 

Project documents & links:

1. MSI Communiqué March 2003
2. MSI Project Update June 2003
3. [for further updates see www.jo-in.org]

Relevant links:

• Project Website: Joint Initiative on Corporate Accountability and Workers' Rights website
• Other Participants:
  • Clean Clothes Campaign website
  • FairWear Foundation website
  • Fair Labor Association website
  • Social Accountability website
  • Workers Rights Consortium website