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Top 3 News Stories
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Spring 2011 Internships
(New York, NY)
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Social Accountability International (SAI) is a non-profit, multi-stakeholder organization established to advance the human rights of workers by promoting decent work conditions, labor rights, and corporate social responsibility through voluntary standards and capacity building.
SAI is headquartered in the United States with field representation in Brazil, China, Costa Rica, India, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Philippines, Switzerland, and UAE.
For newsletter inquiries contact:SAI Communications Manager- Joleen Ong, jong@sa-intl.org |
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 SAI Announces Enhanced Corporate Programs Membership
New Corporate Programs Membership will increase benefits, including more interaction and shared learning among members
 | | SAI Corporate Program members in 2011 represent a range of industries. |
SAI is pleased to announce its newly enhanced Corporate Programs, which seek to enable more interaction and shared learning among all members.
Offered at no increased cost, this revised membership program provides companies with greater access to SAI's sophisticated supply chain management training- including Social Fingerprint� - multi-stakeholder input, and the ability to confidentially benchmark their programs against other members. The changes are designed to benefit current members, which include companies from a range of industries, in addition to all incoming members. The three levels of Corporate Programs membership - Supporting, Explorer and Signatory - each will offer added services. Some of the new services for companies and their suppliers were developed in response to member input. According to Craig Moss, Director of SAI's Corporate Programs & Training, the new membership program is a great opportunity for a company to help expand its professional development to tackle critical social issues in the supply chain.
"The enhancements in SAI's Corporate Programs aim to increase the cost-effectiveness of helping companies measure and improve the social performance of their supply chains," said Moss. "Several of the new services were created in response to input from our members, in particular those that will increase shared learning and allow companies to benchmark against each other."
All Corporate Program members will sign on to a Statement of Shared Mission, which states the philosophy of the program- to 'measure and improve' the management of social performance in a company's supply chain. Companies will express respect for SAI and its global SA8000� through placement of a public statement: "As a Corporate Member of SAI, we share the mission to improve working conditions in our supply chain, in accordance with performance criteria based on relevant ILO conventions and national law, utilizing management systems and multi-stakeholder dialogue." All SAI Corporate members share the same commitment regardless of their Membership level. SAI recognizes that companies joining Corporate Programs vary in their existing performance levels. The goal of Corporate Programs is to promote improvement regardless of a company's level when it joins. There is no inherent performance difference by level of membership.
Specifically, SAI Corporate Members commit to:
1. Use a management systems approach to improve social performance in their supply chains.
2. Participate in the Social Fingerprint� Supply Chain Management program on an annual basis, consisting of:
a. Conduct self-assessment in six categories:
i. Scope and Risk
ii. Aggregate Rating of Suppliers
iii. Annual Improvement of Suppliers
iv. Integration of Compliance & Sourcing
v. Supplier Communications & Purchasing Practices
vi. Complaint Management & Resolution
b. Receive SAI independent evaluation of the 6 categories
c. Review their Supply Chain Management rating, benchmarked against the aggregated scores of other companies, and then engage in dialog with SAI about development and implementation of an improvement plan.
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SAI & ICCO Working to Operationalize Ruggie Guiding Principles
SAI & ICCO will collaborate on a handbook and toolkit to help businesses implement the UN Guiding Principles for Business & Human Rights
 SAI and the Netherlands-based Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation (ICCO) are pleased to announce the launch of a collaborative project to operationalize the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. SAI, with support from ICCO, will develop a handbook and training program based on the framework. The focus will be on helping businesses develop and implement management systems to operationalize the Guiding Principles in their supply chain. The handbook will also include a step-by-step guide with sample documents, and advice on how companies can scale the system to their own size and level of risk.
Finalized in March 2011 by UN Special Representative John Ruggie, the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights are intended to help operationalize the UN "Protect, Respect and Remedy" Framework. To assist in this transformation from principles to practice, SAI and ICCO's handbook and training program will help companies address questions concerning interpretation, scope, and practical integration. The handbook is expected to be released in mid-2012, and the training will be initially piloted in the Netherlands, Brazil and India; additional countries are expected to be included later. The training will be offered in the classroom, and also online, through SAI's Social Fingerprint � Online Training Center.
The Guiding Principles of the UN "Protect, Respect and Remedy" framework were endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2011. The framework gained further significance when it aligned with the revised OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprise in May 2011. The framework consists of three key pillars - the role of the state to protect its citizens against human right violations; the responsibility of business to respect human rights; and the importance of access to remedy for victims of human rights violations. The framework provides the much needed, critical focal point from which both public and private actors can fulfill expectations to respect the human rights of workers in company supply chains. The project is a follow-up to a seminar organized by ICCO in early 2011 that focused on Special Representative Ruggie�s work. SAI Europe Representative Edwin Koster participated in that seminar.
For more information, contact SAI Europe Representative Edwin Koster at Ekoster@sa-intl.org. |
ISSP Webinar: Implementing Living Wages in Global Supply ChainsMatt Fischer-Daly will lead this webinar, featuring factory case studies from Thailand and Honduras
In supply chains across the world, men and women labor in low-wage jobs, making insufficient income in a regular work week to cover the cost of living. What can responsible businesses do to ensure that workers throughout the supply chain receive living wages? What are the implications of wage levels for the sustainability of communities around the world? Join SAI Senior Manager Matt Fischer-Daly for a discussion on how businesses can implement living wages in their global supply chains, and the role of certification standards such as SAI's SA8000 �. This webinar will feature two case studies, from Thailand and Honduras. For more information about this upcoming webinar, contact SAI Communications Manager Joleen Ong at JOng@sa-intl.org.
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"Do Not Just Understand the World - Improve it"
Reflections on the IFC-ILO Better Work Conference, "Workers, Businesses and Government: Understanding Labor Compliance in Global Supply Chains"
On October 28, Steven Purcey, Director of the Policy Integration Department at the ILO, closed the 3-day Better Work Conference with instructions: 'do not just understand the world- improve it, with courage and informed strategies'. The message reflects the Better Work approach to improving labor standards compliance. SAI attended the conference to hone our own programs, which share with Better Work the strategies of tripartite capacity building and promotion of social dialogue as the foundations of an enabling environment for labor rights. The Better Work program is a partnership between the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and International Labour Organisation (ILO) and builds on the two organizations' expertise in labor and private-sector finance to improve compliance with labor standards and competitiveness in global supply chains. Better Work currently has begun in the apparel sector with country programs in Cambodia, Haiti, Indonesia, Jordan, Lesotho, Nicaragua and Vietnam. These country programs monitor factories' performance against international labor standards, provide technical capacity-building, and facilitate social dialogue among worker representatives, factories, governments and global brands. The Better Work conference brought together practitioners, policymakers and researchers to evaluate the projects' performance to-date and identify improvements. Strengths of Better Work repeatedly highlighted at the conference include its tripartite participation, promotion of social dialogue and transparency. Participants also identified key compliance challenges that require particular attention, including lack of freedom of association and collective bargaining rights, casualization of employment, non-payment of wages and low wage levels. Much to the credit of the Better Work team, the conference focused on strategies to address the challenges: more and clearer incentives from global brands to promote responsible performance in the supply chain; training on labor rights, organizational management and grievance mechanisms for workers and trade unions as well as employers; and, as coined by Professor Richard Feinberg, a "whole of government" approach to national government's responsibility to labor law enforcement. Doug Miller, ITGLWF-INDITEX Professor in Ethical Fashion at Northumbria University in the UK, presented two particularly compelling proposals: First, he suggested a global non-victimization commitment to provide workers with insurance that use of their organizing and collective bargaining rights will not be met with retribution or discrimination. Second, he proposed transparent use of "standard minute" values in factories to enable fact-based wage negotiations. The proposals merit attention for their precise focus on key challenges, potential impact and practicality. The Capturing the Gains international research network, which is studying the impacts of Better Work, presented evidence to convince companies which do not yet recognize the role of Decent Work in their competitiveness model that their time is now. Project evaluations from across the globe reported that implementing 'human resource management innovations' - such as performance-based and negotiated pay, communications and complaint mechanisms and training - improve productivity and business competitiveness. The strategy of the first Better Work country program, in Cambodia, was to link export licenses to participation. This signaled the scope of Better Work's vision. Where voluntary standards, monitoring and capacity-building programs shine are in jurisdictions where government's enforcement of labor laws is most strong. The clear challenge is how to create spill-over effects from voluntary initiatives to government policy implementation, creating a mutually supportive system of compliance and continual improvement. SAI was honored to participate in the Better Work Conference and looks forward to opportunities to respond collaboratively to the challenges identified, by scaling up the strategies of promoting tripartite social dialogue and capacity-building to ensure workers' rights. This article was written by SAI Senior Manager, Matt Fischer-Daly. For more information, contact him at Mfischer-daly@sa-intl.org.
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Honduras, After the 2009 CoupHow CDH, SAI's Honduras-based partner in Project Cultivar, paved the way forward through social dialogue | |
Just three months before the June 2009 coup, this multi-stakeholder group convened by CDH, representing suppliers, unions, and civil society, discussed ways to cultivate a culture of labor compliance in Honduran agriculture
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The first military coup to rattle Central America since the end of the Cold War ousted democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. The President of the Honduran Congress Roberto Micheletti was immediately sworn in as the country's new president, and hundreds of Zelaya supporters took to the streets in protest. The ensuing polarization of Honduran society significantly impacted work of the Center for Human Development (CDH), the local implementing partner for SAI's Project Cultivar. Half way into the four-year U.S. Department of Labor-funded project to improve labor law compliance in agriculture, SAI and CDH needed to reassess their strategies for engaging workers, employers and government officials in a rapidly deteriorating political environment. This and other momentous events experienced by CDH during the years of Project Cultivar are chronicled in an article published this summer by REAL CARD Magazine, an international labor rights publication supported by the Canadian government, and dedicated to promoting the protection of international labor norms in the region. Written by CDH Executive Director Adelina V�squez, the article titled "Social Dialogue as the Conductive Thread of Project Cultivar" highlights CDH's experience in coordinating bilateral and tripartite social dialogue activities as the means to achieving labor law compliance in the CAFTA-DR region. Throughout Project Cultivar, CDH convened Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue Roundtables at the national, crop sector and local levels to promote awareness of labor standards and support for their implementation. Participants in 2008 and early 2009 meetings included the Labor Secretary and Minister of the Secretariat of Industry and Trade as keynote speakers. In response to the severe polarization of the country following the coup-d'-�tat of 2009, CDH adapted the facilitation of its tripartite social dialogue strategy to the context by engaging the national tripartite Consejo Socio-Econ�mico (CES) or Economic and Social Council. Executive Director Adelina V�squez credits CDH's longstanding relationship with trade unions for its ability to regroup after the coup, "CDH worked with the unions as a key stakeholder in Project Cultivar. CDH's historical relationship with this sector greatly facilitated the support and consensus needed for Project Cultivar's implementation strategy, which in turn enabled substantive work processes in areas of bipartite and tripartite social dialogue, where union representation, government and businesses were instrumental, as key actors of the project." In March 2011, CDH presented Project Cultivar to a meeting of the CES with its respective tripartite bodies from other countries in the region. CDH was invited to present achievements, particularly the university degree course it had developed to its meeting. The CES also nominated Project Cultivar - Honduras as a good practice in Social Dialogue and invited CDH to present the course to the Foro de la Red Laboral de Centroam�rica y Rep�blica Dominicana (Central American and Dominican Republic Labor Network Forum). By the end of the project, CDH succeeded in establishing labor rights in the agricultural sector as an agenda item of the CES. View the original article in Spanish in the REAL CARD magazine @bit.ly/qOHbNu. This article was written by SAI Development Manager Eliza Wright. For more information, contact her at EWright@sa-intl.org.
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Meet SAI's New Intern: Rabayah Akhter
Ms. Akhter will be working with SAI Development Manager Eliza Wright
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Rabayah Akhter
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About Rabayah Akhter: I am a Master's candidate at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where I'm concentrating in Social Policy and Management. I'm most interested in good governance and public management in developing countries and how governments can be more effective at policy making and implementation. Before I came to New York, I was living in Mopti, Mali for 2 years as a Peace Corps volunteer. My primary assignment was to help a local NGO improve its small business of selling jewelry made by women recovering from fistula surgery. I spent much of my time adapting to the culture and getting to know people. I also learned a great deal about development and aid from the ground level. One thing that really disturbed me was the lack of local ownership of projects that were funded and designed abroad. One of the reasons I genuinely admire the work of SAI is that it really makes an effort to involve local actors (especially local governments) and get their support for projects. After creating a database of past SAI projects, I am now much more familiar with the sorts of labor rights issues people face in different countries and how SAI tries to address them. Working with Eliza has been really fun and informative so far, and I hope to help her draft at least one grant proposal by the end of the year!
For more information, please contact Rabayah Akhter at RAkhter@sa-intl.org.
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Highlights & Announcements
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