How Cascale, Fair Wear and SLCP Activate Human Rights Due Diligence at the Annual Meeting 2025
Cascale, Fair Wear, SLCP will dive deeper on creating impactful human rights due diligence at the Annual Meeting 2025.
by Lindsay Wright
Cascale’s Annual Member Meeting, “A Movement for All,” takes place in Hong Kong September 15 to 17. The event will address how we, as an industry, can collectively address and solve two of the most critical challenges facing our industry today: Combating Climate Change and Supporting Decent Work For All.
It’s an outsized challenge but a shared commitment. Leaders today are those frontrunner brands, suppliers, policymakers, and non-corporate players that are doubling down on climate change and decent work as a business imperative. Together, they are confronting a dizzying array of duplicate initiatives, repeat data sources, and outdated auditing systems in place. By collectively refining the approach to measuring, verifying, and enhancing social and environmental performance, compliance and responsible purchasing practices becomes a nearer reality.
The State of Play
Compliance is a growing area of interest for industry players, and convening organizations have a role to play. In its background note on regulatory developments concerning due diligence for responsible business conduct, The Role of Sustainability Initiatives in Mandatory Due Diligence (OECD, 2022) recognizes Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) as playing a crucial role, acting as both facilitators, providing tools and guidance for companies, and verifiers, assessing and potentially certifying company practices. But the guidance also notes that, despite recent examples of initiatives converging and aligning approaches, the landscape is still complex and confusing, with 455 ecolabels and various environmental schemes listed in the Ecolabel Index at the time of writing.
In this playing field and true to this year’s event theme, Cascale, the Social and Labor Convergence Program (SLCP), and Fair Wear will come together to be greater than the sum of our already formidable parts to promote impactful Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) by brands and suppliers. We aim to support stakeholders on their journey through building and leveraging joint tools, best practices, and accountability mechanisms.
This joint work builds on discussions we originally held at our Annual Meeting in Boston, back in 2023, exploring the potential of HRDD as an organizing principle for the industry, and aims to be complementary – rather than additive. Because it’s only together that can we scale accountability in an actionable way.
Combining Unique Strengths
Between us, we believe we have all the tools a company needs to conduct impactful due diligence. Cascale owns and develops the Higg Index suite of tools, and since February, has owned the Better Buying toolset informed by surveys on brand and retailer purchasing practices. We have over 300 members and 40,000 Higg Index users. Fair Wear led the industry effort towards alignment on the Common Framework for Responsible Purchasing, while its HRDD Academy supports brands to better understand the HRDD cycle and practically implement human rights due diligence both within the company and across the supply chain. SLCP now boasts over 250 signatories and its Converged Assessment Framework (CAF) forms the foundation of Cascale’s Higg Facility Social & Labor Module (Higg FSLM).
It’s an executive priority. “Cascale, SLCP, and Fair Wear see great opportunities in driving impactful HRDD by working more closely together,” said Harsh Saini, interim chief executive officer of Cascale. “Together, we have immense convening power, expertise, and volumes of credible and actionable data. We are all speaking the same language on due diligence, and our tools fit together and complement each other, providing brands and retailers with everything they need for their due diligence journey.”
As well, the work becomes a shared responsibility. “We’re united around a shared vision,” added Annabel Meurs, executive director of Fair Wear. “This will set the tone in the industry on what impactful due diligence looks like, holding brands and retailers accountable in making progress and to scale up best practices that will have a real impact on workers.”
Steve Harris, COO of SLCP , underscored: “Our three organizations will work together to develop and cross-promote each bilateral partner’s tools, drive collective action, sharing HRDD knowledge and best practice across the whole of our membership and signatories, and advocating for decent work with policymakers.”
The next opportunity to hear more about our collective expression of deepened and more targeted coordination will be at Cascale’s Annual Member Meeting in Hong Kong, September 15 to 17. The event will feature presentations from Fair Wear and SLCP on key topics, including making responsible purchasing practices the norm within the industry, and what needs to happen next to drive real movement on audit fatigue. You can also visit the Cascale, Fair Wear, and SLCP booths in the exhibition area to find out more about the tools and guidance available.
