Since last year, our labor standards working group has worked towards the creation and publication of a Best Practice Guide and complementary Checklist to publicize a series of guiding principles for all members of the Ethical Trade Forums. In order to evolve practices and activities towards a continuous improvement and due diligence approach.
The 5 guiding principles are as follows:
- We respect current labor legislation and regulations.
- We guarantee working conditions that protect the health, safety and well-being of our workers.
- We offer and guarantee adequate training for our workers, including legal obligations and aspects provided by the Ethical Trade Forums related to human and labor rights.
- We actively participate in the Ethical Trade Forums and implement the resources that are developed within the working groups, training sessions and events when they are relevant.
- We meet the expectations of our stakeholders and actively collaborate with them.
The application of each of the principles is contextualized in the Spanish legislation, as well as customer expectations and the Ethical Trade Forums.
The Checklist (available in Spanish) has been designed to guide companies in the agri-food sector to make tangible the implementation of the Guiding Principles of the Ethical Trade Forums in each of their organizations and to evaluate their status in terms of compliance with ethical-social obligations. This tool can be used as a self-assessment or as a format to assess risks in the supply chain.
The Best Practice Guide focuses on providing key information on each of the Guiding Principles such as applicable legislation, context and supporting resources.
Our objective is to provide support tools to farmers and producers to understand and apply regulations and ethical-social and labor expectations in their day to day, to reduce risks, promote knowledge and provide a solid basis for the establishment of systems of management to control this completion.
These documents have been published in June 2021 and will be in the public consultation process for 6 months.