In a new day of the specialized seminars organized by the Ethical Trade Forums as part of their professional training program, we have had the participation of Nolan Quirós and Soledad González to talk about “Social Audit Requirements”, a meeting that It is proposed as a deepening of the contents that were already developed in the seminar on Social Audits that took place in 2021 and that affects the need to certify the improvement of the working conditions of the workers.
With more than 110 registered, the seminar was held online on May 19 and had the virtual assistance of professionals connected from various parts of Spain, Europe and America.
From Costa Rica, the Global GAP expert, Nolan Quirós, spoke about the Risk Assessment in Social Practices (GRASP), aimed at certifying compliance with labor rights and good practices in agricultural production procedures. The principles to be evaluated, the requirements of the evaluation, the benefits that certification entails and the keys to an audit that adopts “a mentality of continuous improvement” were some of the keys to his intervention, which generated several questions among the participants and resulted in very interesting.
From the United Kingdom, the auditor and expert in Corporate Social Responsibility, Soledad González, spoke to us about “SMETA Audits in practice”. SMETA is Sedex’s social audit methodology, which enables companies to assess and understand working conditions in their supply chain. It uses the ETI code and local laws as an assessment tool, focusing primarily on the health and safety and labor standards modules. During her speech, Soledad González detailed the parts of the audit process, the characteristics and representativeness of the interviews carried out with the workers and the documents that must be provided for the audit to be favorable, all from the point of view of the auditor/ to and from a very practical approach.
The presentations of this new seminar are now accessible in the private documents section of the Ethical Trade Forums, available to professionals from companies linked to the FCE.