March 24th the Ethical Trade Forums organised their International online Event, to discuss “Worker’s engagement as driver of change”. This is the first time that this international meeting has been held online due to the Covid-19 health crisis.
Many of the presentations were linked to that topic; internal communication at the companies, workers representation, workers voice, grievance channels and induction protocols to name a few.
The agenda prepared for this event brought together 250 attendees, including our experts panel on The European Union Human Right Due Diligence legislation such as Franzisca Humbert from Oxfam, Owain Johnstone from Ethical Trading Initiative and Mercedes Jaffé from Driscoll ́s.
The participation was massive in terms of speakers; working group representatives, external experts and stakeholders, local producers and even workers through 3 videos that were broadcasted along the day.
During the day several companies shared their best practices in the main room and in one of the 6 workshops delivered that was just for Sustainability best practices.
The other workshops that we carried out were:
- Workers & Management representatives Dialogue
- Best Practices Awards workshop
- Workers survey workshop
- Grievance channels: safeguards for the protection of workers. This workshop was delivered by the Grievance channel working group along with Stronger Together.
Some of the key things announced or shared at the meeting:
- New Responsible use of Labour providers checklist
- English version for public consultation of the Guidelines for preventing and action against harassment
- Forums impact analysis for 2020 and 2021 annual plan including coming online seminars, best practices collection and new items in our website
- Circular labour migration group presentation
- Workers survey pilot project results and coming plans
- Presentation of the workers and management representatives dialogue pilot project
All the information, including documents shared and links to videos of the full day session and workshops will be available in the Private area of our web (please click in Private documents).
If you are not registered, please do it here. Register to private area and you will receive a password to have access to it.