Chapter 5: Social
The Social chapter of the Sustainable Agriculture Standard seeks to support workers to achieve better working and living conditions for themselves and their families and to promote equality and respect for all, with special attention to vulnerable groups such as migrants, children, youth, and women. The Standard sets requirements related to fundamental human and labor rights, Living Wage, health and safety, and decent living and working conditions and supports management to have a management system in place that aligns with international frameworks on business and human rights.
In this section, we will zoom in on changes to the requirements on social topics and highlight relevant examples. We have introduced these changes to make things clearer and simplify implementation.
You can review all changes to the social requirements in the documentation found in the Resources section.
Let's now look at two relevant changes:
A) Less mandatory improvement requirements
B) Living Wage requirements are consolidated into one requirement
A) Less mandatory improvement requirements
Several mandatory improvement requirements have been removed. You can review all changes to the social requirements in the documentation found in the Resources section. The Standard v1.4 contains an overview table that lists all changes compared with v1.3.
Continuous improvement is still required for assess-and-address topics as these are a cornerstone of our human rights approach. The assess-and-address system requires Certificate Holders to have specific measures in place to prevent, identify, monitor, remediate risks and actual cases related to child labor, forced labor, discrimination, workplace violence and harassment. Risk mitigation measures need to be incorporated in the management plan, implemented and monitored in order to address those risks. These risk assessments need to be repeated every three years. For medium and high-risk topics, additional in-depth risk assessments need to be implemented.
B) Living Wage requirements are consolidated into one requirement
While our previous livelihoods approach continues to succeed in key areas like income diversification, management practices, and farm profitability, it has also faced challenges in achieving broader impact. One of these challenges surrounds the topic of Living Wage.
Living Wage is an emerging area of thinking, study, and implementation. Over the past 4 years, Certificate Holders, companies, and Rainforest Alliance have made big steps through the implementation of the Rainforest Alliance 2020 SAS by:
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Creating awareness
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Making changes on a livelihood level
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Collecting data
We acknowledge that our previous approach did not achieve the desired impact because there are still many uncertainties about the definition of Living Wage benchmarks as well as tools and procedures for the calculation of Living Wage gaps. These uncertainties are not limited to Rainforest Alliance, they are also experienced by other organizations and research institutes.
What is changing?
Version 1.3 of our Sustainable Agriculture Standard had three core Living Wage requirements.
In version 1.4, these three core requirements have been consolidated into one requirement. This is to align with the simplification of the rest of the Standard.
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The indicator for Living Wage is removed.
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Comparison against a Living Wage benchmark is still relevant. However, we are no longer limiting comparisons to just the Global Living Wage Coalition benchmark; other Living Wage benchmarks are now acceptable as well.
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We will no longer provide a specific tool for these calculations; we are not prescribing a particular approach.
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One self-selected requirement and one smart meter requirement have been removed.
Living Wage remains an important topic for Sustainability and for the Rainforest Alliance.
Therefore, requirement 5.4.1 states that management keeps records of all wages and remuneration and assesses this against an acceptable Living Wage benchmark. Details can be found in the Annex of the Social chapter.
Next steps:
Specialized Standard on the topic of livelihoods and human rights in the future
As livelihoods and human rights remain important topics for sustainability and for the Rainforest Alliance, we are developing a specialized Standard on these topics which we will launch in the future.