As an effort to address corporate sustainability practices, the European Commission released its proposal for a Directive on corporate sustainability due diligence (CSDD) on February 23rd, 2022, and was adopted by the European Parliament on June 1st, 2023. A compromise text was adopted by the EU Council on 15 March 2024 and approved by the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI Committee) on 19 March 2024, The rules still need to be voted on by MEPs in April, 2024.

The Directive, aligning with UNGPs and OECD guidelines on the responsibility of business in respecting worker rights, aims to foster sustainable corporate behavior throughout global value chains. Specifically, it obliges large companies headquartered or operating in the EU to integrate due diligence into policies, assess actual or potential worker rights and environmental impacts throughout their operations and their supply chains, and to take action to prevent, mitigate, and remediate the identified worker rights and environmental harms. The law applies to the company’s own operations, its subsidiaries, and its value chains (both direct and indirect business relationships).

Given that the EU is the second largest export market of Vietnam and the context of corporate sustainability due diligence, it is increasingly required that suppliers have sufficient capacity to comply with the national labour law, implement labour standards and international regulations, proactively assess potential risks and develop prevention solution and remediation which will bring real competitive advantages for businesses in more and more challenges context.

Besides the requirement to the suppliers, the context of HRDD legislation opens the opportunities for trade union, particularly factory- level trade union present the important role in ensuring the labor regulation and policy compliance and conducting the risk assessment at factory through the more meaningful participation in whole process. However, the trade union is not fully aware of their opportunities and role as well. And both factory management and trade union lack understanding on the CSDDD, what are different between HRDD and CSR, how to conduct corporate sustainability due diligence at factory and what are the roles of each actor, how to make sure the meaningful stakeholder engagement in the due diligence process.

Making validated stakeholder information and lessons learned accessible in a structured way, through FW’s HRDD facilitation hub, and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Hub (CSDD Hub) developed by CDI, is therefore a central element in our efforts to drive industry action. Also, to make it useful for the suppliers, it can be used by them to monitor progress.

The CSDD Hub Project consists of two phases.

Following developing the CSDD self – assessment, a pilot implementation period will run with suppliers to test and refine the platform’s functionality with actual users.

CDI would like to recruit a consultant / consultancy team to build the structure of the platform to meet the project’s description and requirements.

The duties of the consultant

• Develope the structure framework of platform
• Develop the list of learning module will be presented and train on the platform
• Develop the training module materials on grievance mechanism and social dialogue
• Test the relevant learning modules with suppliers

See detailed information about the recruitment position here.
Deadline for applications: August 15th, 2024