NEW DATA published by the SOCIAL & LABOR CONVERGENCE PROGRAM (SLCP) shows that facilities that use SLCP’s Converged Assessment Framework (CAF) multiple years in a row are seeing fewer violations of national and international labour laws. In 2024, over 10,000 SLCP assessments were completed, impacting an estimated 7.3m workers worldwide.
By enabling facilities to share their SLCP data with multiple stakeholders, a single SLCP assessment can replace multiple redundant and resource intensive audits. In 2024, the sharing of SLCP assessments unlocked a potential of $39m USD for reinvestment in improving working conditions, a 39% increase year-on-year.
Facilities are sharing their SLCP assessments more than ever, with each 2024 assessment shared an average of nearly 3 times, up 16% compared to 2023. 2024 data also shows that continued use of the CAF over time can support facilities to identify and ultimately reduce their number of legal non-compliances, resulting in workplace improvements. This supports SLCP’s theory of change that facility data ownership drives decent work.
Additionally, growing adoption of the CAF, coupled with enhancements to the Data Collection Tool have enabled SLCP to generate deeper data insights this year from aggregate facility data. For example, the CAF now includes deeper and more meaningful gender-related data points. This highlights the potential for aggregate SLCP data to identify trends and inform policy making.
Key data insights from the report include:
• Overtime working hours continue to be a prominent issue in SLCP facilities. By examining a correlation between excessive working hours and other factors in the CAF, there was a strong correlation with the use of subcontractors in a facility and with workers’ wages based on legal requirements rather than a living wage (p. 18-19).
• While excessive overtime working hours remains the top two legal non-compliances in 2024, over half of the legal non-compliances in SLCP assessments are now linked to the Wages and Benefits section of the CAF (p. 16-17).
• Although women make up 59% of the workforce, men occupy 67% of the supervisory or managerial positions in SLCP facilities with 35% of total facilities paying men more than women in the same or similar positions (p. 22-28).
The report also highlights SLCP’s collaborations and policy work, including engagement with partners, stakeholders, and other multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs). As SLCP represents just one part of the broader effort to improve working conditions, meaningful progress depends on collective action and strong collaboration across the industry.
CEO Janet Mensink said, “We’re seeing clear evidence that our vision and mission are being realized, with users of the CAF making tangible improvements to working conditions that are being reflected in assessments the following years. But there’s still much more work to be done in the industry. Our aggregate facility data shows that 92 per cent of assessments in 2024 included at least one non-compliance against the national labor law.
“This is why our work continues to be so critical – in the policy space, through collaboration with stakeholders, and in the growing adoption of SLCP. Together, we can continue to drive meaningful change.”
The Social & Labor Convergence Program (SLCP) is a multi-stakeholder initiative with over 260 signatories striving for decent working conditions in global supply chains. Central to SLCP’s mission is the Converged Assessment Framework (CAF) – a universal social assessment tool that eliminates the need for proprietary social audits – allowing saved resources to be redirected into improvement programs for workers.
In addition, SLCP supports stakeholders in accessing credible and actionable social and labor data for Human Rights Due Diligence implementation and enables collaborative solutions to improve working conditions. SLCP is registered as an independent non-profit foundation (stichting), based in the Netherlands.