Our experimental projects

Our experimental projects provide our corporate, trade union and NGO members with an opportunity to work together to identify and promote good practice in specific aspects of code implementation, often in collaboration with their suppliers and partners.

Each project focuses on a different and often challenging area of code implementation. Current projects cover a wide range of issues, sectors and locations: from the homeworkers in India, to temporary labour in the UK, to examining how retailers' purchasing practices may compromise an ability to meet the Base Code; plus guidelines on how to implement the Base Code with smallholder farmers.

Below you will find an overview of all our current projects – click on the relevant link for more detailed information about each project.

 

Current Projects 

China Project:

Over the next two years this project will focus on health and safety. The focus will be on raising awareness with suppliers about the importance and benefits of involving workers in health and safety committees and establishing effective worker management committees. As well as this practical work the project also acts as a forum for a wider group of members to share experiences and discuss particular issues in sourcing from China.
 

Homeworker Project:

This project has been set up to establish how the ETI Base Code can best be applied, implemented and monitored with homeworkers, and to document different approaches to improving homeworkers’ conditions. Work began by exploring the conditions of homeworkers making Christmas crackers in the UK (report available). The project has now moved to focus on homeworkers in the fabric embellishment industry in Northern India, where a highly active tri-partite sub-group has been working throughout 2005 in partnership with the UK group on developing guidelines to applying and implementing the ETI Base Code with Homeworkers. The first draft of these guidelines should be complete by April 2006. The recommendations for retailers and suppliers will then be tested by group member companies, while the Delhi group will seek to establish a ‘multi-stakeholder action agency’, ideally including government officials, contractors and homeworkers themselves, that will implement key parts of the guidelines requiring co-operation across the supply chain. This element of the project falls within our capacity building programme and represents an exciting and unprecedented step forward in the labour rights field.
 

Purchasing Practices:

This project aims to increase members understanding of the impact of sourcing companies’ purchasing practices on conditions for workers and to develop, test and share practical (cross-sectoral) examples of purchasing policies and practices that support commitment to labour standards. The project started in April 2005, and is composed of a number of sub-groups looking at different purchasing aspects.
 

Sri Lanka Garment Industry Project:

This project is investigating ways of applying the standards and provisions of the ETI Base Code in the Sri Lankan garment industry, by developing robust, rigorous, and credible social audit methodologies for identifying issues, formulating corrective actions and assessing their impact. A first round of audit testing was completed in 2005. The project is now moving into its second phase of audit refinement and testing and is also exploring the possibility of establishing an industry-wide agency that could audit across the industry using the models refined by the project. Establishment of this agency will fall under ETI’s Capacity Building programme.
 

Smallholders Project:

This project aimed to set out how the ETI Base Code can be applied, implemented, monitored and met with smallholders and their workers, and to document different approaches to improving their conditions. The project group has now produced guidelines for all stakeholders working with smallholders, following a process of consultation and research using the tea and fresh produce industries in Kenya as a case study. The resulting ETI Smallholder Guidelines were launched in Nairobi, Spain and UK in September 2005, published in English, Kiswahili and Spanish, and are available for downloading on this website. A workshop to review implementation progress and uptake will be held in March 2006.

 

 

Former Projects

Follow this link for information about our former projects.