The Commission has today proposed to weaken mechanisms designed to hold companies accountable to the abuse of workers in their supply chains.
Measures brought in to address conditions like those that led to the Rana Plaza tragedy would be dramatically watered down, if the European Commission’s Omnibus deregulation drive goes through.
Two human rights directives geared at holding companies accountable to human rights abuses in their supply chains were adopted in the past mandate: the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
The EU Commission is now cow-towing to corporate lobbyist calls to neutralise a number of measures set out in these two directives by:
- Limiting scope of due diligence: Companies would only need to assess risks in direct suppliers, ignoring human rights and environmental abuses deeper in their supply chains.
- Weakening corporate accountability: Removing civil liability means victims of corporate abuse would struggle to seek justice, and companies could evade responsibility for harmful practices.
- Reducing the enforcement of due diligence: Companies would no longer be required to cut ties with abusive business partners, and monitoring would be reduced from annual reviews to once every five years.
- Delaying implementation: The proposed changes would push back the CSDDD’s transposition and company compliance deadlines, slowing efforts to address corporate abuses.
In the lead up to the publication of the Omnibus, trade unionists and green campaigners staged two protests. The first to call out the rigged ‘consultation’ and the second to call out the deregulation drive underpinning the Omnibus package.
Isabelle Schömann, ETUC Deputy General Secretary, said:
“This is not simplification. This is deregulation. The Commission claims to be cutting red tape but is in fact gutting its human rights legislation.
“These two pieces of human rights legislation are the fruit of years of consultation, of analysis and of negotiations. As well as being inefficient, going back on the results of this process is deeply undemocratic.
“What’s more, this Omnibus proposal is the result of a rigged process in which the European Commission invited five times as many corporate lobbyists as representatives of trade unions or NGOs to its ‘consultation’.
“The von der Leyen II Commission does not currently have much to offer workers. On top of that, its deregulation agenda is favouring the very companies that violate workers' rights. This Commission must change direction quickly or it will lose the support of workers and their trade unions.”
