The Cotton Textiles and Export Promotion Council (Texprocil), plans to launch an initiative to have a standard-neutral, converged assessment framework for the textile and clothing industry. The initiative, ‘Social and Labor Convergence Programme (SLCP),’ is led by world’s leading manufacturers, brands, retailers, industry groups, non-governmental organisations and service providers. The objective of this initiative is to improve the working conditions in textile units by allowing resources previously designated for compliance audits to be redirected towards the improvement of social and labor conditions.
The SCLP is not a code of conduct or compliance programme. The converged assessment framework is a tool developed by the SLCP, which provides a data set with no value judgment or scoring. It is, however, compatible with existing audit systems and codes of conduct. The same data set can be used by a wide-range of stakeholders. It eliminates the need for repetitive audits to be carried out on the same facility.
For exporting units, it will reduce the number of social audits and facilitate measuring of employment practices, thus improving working conditions and employee relations. It also redeploys resources towards improvement actions and fosters collaboration between supply chain partners. The SLCP would be holding free seminars at Mumbai, Bengaluru, Tiruppur, and New Delhi and will launch operations in India, China, Sri Lanka and Taiwan this month.
