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The Global Social Compliance Programme (GSCP) – a partnership of some of the world’s biggest companies – has today launched their new reference code. The launch is intended to coincide with the 60^th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The partnership includes multinational retailers and brands such as Carrefour, Hasbro, Ikea, Hewlett-Packard, Metro, Migros, Tesco and Wal-Mart and claims to be the “most significant business alliance for social justice yet seen“.

The code is the first of a series of reference tools that GSCP intend to develop with the aim to help companies work together to deliver a common message and reduce duplication and confusion.

The past ten years has seen the development of divergent approaches to upholding labour standards including the proliferation of codes and the duplication of many efforts. Progress has been slow. All those working in the field of labour standards would agree that efforts need to be harmonised and there needs to be more cross-industry collaboration. The new GSCP code promises to drive convergence and “deliver a shared, consistent and global approach for the continuous improvement of working conditions across all categories and sectors.”

 Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC) point out that there are already a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives operating in the field of labour standards including the Ethical Trading Initiative, Fair Wear Foundation, Fair Labor Association, Social Accountability International and the Workers Rights Consortium operating in the field of labour standards These existing initiatives are co-operating to harmonize their own standards through the JO-IN programme. CCC argues that there is no need for another code and the existence of the new code may even undermine existing efforts.

The GSCP, however, has garnered high-level support backing from the United Nations, the International Federation of Human Rights, the Global Union Network and CSR Asia. GSCP stresses its credentials as a tool for sharing best-practice and that it is not a monitoring scheme or a substitute for existing systems.

The partnership has the potential to create a sea change in how companies collaborate to ensure labour standards are upheld and for this reason alone it should be applauded.. As Terry Babbs, Director of International Trading Law and Technical at Tesco and the GSCP Chairman said “Our businesses together touch millions of people either directly through our customers and employees or indirectly through hundreds of millions of workers in our supply chain.” Impactt wish the partnership every success in their endeavours.