Labour Standards Established To Promote Sustainable Development Of Footwear Manufacturing Industry

To promote the sustainable development of the whole industry, this Wednesday, Columbia, Adidas, VF, REI, NIKE and many brands, retailers, industry organizations and non-profit organizations of the United States outdoor industry association signed a joint statement in Amsterdam calling for a global appeal.

A unified labour standard should be established within the scope.

On the same day, the company issued a joint statement on "SocialandLaborConvergenceProject" (social and labor unified convergence project, hereinafter referred to as SLCP). The aim is to create standardized social and labor efficiency evaluation methods in the footwear manufacturing supply chain through the joint efforts of the whole industry, so as to achieve the real sustainable development of the whole industry chain.

The industry generally believes that through this general assessment tool, the repeated audit cost of footwear manufacturing industry will be greatly reduced, and the cost savings will be used to improve the social welfare of millions of workers in this industry.

SLCP cooperation is sustainable

The Alliance (SAC) has contributed to the strong support of the major sporting goods industry organizations and companies.

The first batch of signing statements includes Nike, H&M, VFC-Timberland, LeviStrauss&Co., PVHCorp., GapInc., Target, ColumbiaSportswearCo., Adidas group, and standard holding organization WRAP, non-profit supply chain improvement expert team Sedex, International Apparel Federation and other stakeholders in the value chain.

SLCP will follow the existing success assessment framework of SAC and its members, and respond positively to the European Commission, OECD and some of the calls and suggestions to build a unified standard country for the global footwear manufacturing industry.

"This industry has heard voices from many different stakeholders, and believes that the time has come to build unified standards across the industry."

BaptisteCarriere-Pradal, SAC, vice president of Europe, said: "we need to check more actions: break the original redundancy and inconsistent assessment, and establish a more efficient and pparent unified standard, thus promoting the development of the upper reaches of the footwear manufacturing industry.

Integration is the key to increasing pparency and improving working conditions in the global supply chain.

In October 21st, a public statement issued by the signatory organization pointed out that different codes, auditing, clauses and processing methods of shoes and clothing manufacturing enterprises in various countries were the shackles that hindered the improvement of social and labor efficiency in the global supply chain of the industry.

"In the supply chain of footwear manufacturing, the social audit started over 20 years ago. We can see that the number of standards and methods of social auditing has increased significantly, but some of them have only slight differences.

Brands and retailers use their own slightly different standards, which leads manufacturers to allocate valuable resources to cope with a steady stream of audits.

In addition to creating "audit fatigue", this repetition also reduces the value of audit itself and consumes resources originally used to increase productivity.

The project is trying to start a dialogue in the whole industry, which will promote the industry:

To enhance pparency by reducing the number of social and labour assessment projects in the whole industry;

The financial resources that are put into evaluation are invested in efficiency improvement.

Financial resources turn from assessment to performance improvement.

To strengthen the social impact of the upper supply chain of footwear manufacturing industry.