The last 10 years have been very active ones over the evolution of business accountability. The UN, the ILO and OECD have revised their instruments for (multinational) companies to better prevent, mitigate and eliminate negative impact directly linked to their operations.
In Europe, the 2014 directive on non-financial information and several national legislative initiatives, particularly the French one in 2017 setting up vigilance plans, are opening the door up to a new important area of strategic company decisions, which is very relevant also for workers and their representatives.
This project aims at improving the knowledge of workers ‘representatives regarding these recent developments and to facilitate initiatives by workers and their representatives, as well as consistent and comprehensive workers’ involvement in companies’ decision-making processes on these issues. Its goal is also to analyse to what extent a European Directive on due diligence would complement the current legislative framework and the conditions for a more efficient social dialogue at company level along the supply chain.
Each co-applicant, IndustriAll Europe, EFFAT, ETF, UNI Europa and EFBWW with the support of Syndex, will organise a workshop to assess the repercussion of these topics in its respective sectors. EWC members from a large range of companies and trade union officials will be invited to share their experiences and views on current and future challenges and opportunities. Syndex will provide short research and training session in each workshop. ETUC, ITUC and TUAC will also participate in meetings where necessary.
A final conference will take place in order to gather inputs from the different sectors to identify differences and common points and prepare an information toolkit for EWCs and trade unions on due diligence as well as a working document on company practices, mapping of company reports, providing examples, scenarios and case studies.