Social & Labor Convergence Team Meeting
In February, Avedis Seferian (APSCA Chair) and Rona Starr (APSCA Executive Director) had the opportunity to meet and spend a few hours working with the Social and Labor (S&L) Convergence Project Team in Amsterdam. The focus of this meeting was to continue the conversation about how APSCA and S&L can work closely and to begin developing a framework to articulate the expectation of our business relationship. While the two initiatives are quite distinct in their core missions, the discussion explored areas of common interest and intersection, with avenues of partnering for mutual benefit emerging. More to come on this front in the coming months.
From Left to Right: Avedis Seferian (APSCA Chair), Baptise Carriere-Pradal (VP-EU, SAC), Rona Starr (APSCA Executive Director), Janet Mensink (S&L Convergence Project Director), Christian Smith (S&L Convergence Project Manager).
Working Groups’ (WG) UpdateThe three working groups continue to make progress and are committed to their project plans. As we stay focused on our overall desired outcome of “creating a license to operate” for social compliance auditors, similar to CPA for Accounting or the BAR for legal, our working groups are hard at work.
WG1 (Identify Categories) – Presented a framework document to both the Consultation Group as well as WG2. Once finalized, WG2 will define auditor competencies required to identify / verify during a social audit. The framework document contains a list of categories which occur in social audits. Feedback has been received from the Consultation Group, WG2, the Executive & Stakeholder Boards. All feedback is being incorporated into the next draft which will be shared for public comment in March 2017.
WG2 (Identify Auditor Levels Auditor Competencies) – Presented preliminary Auditor Levels with definitions to the Consultation Group as well as the Executive & Stakeholder Boards. All feedback is being incorporated and the pre-requisites to obtain each level are being defined.
WG3 (Develop a Professional Code of Conduct) – After much benchmarking, WG3 have developed and presented the preliminary Code of Professional Conduct to the Consultation Group and are in the process of incorporating the feedback.
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