The Fairness, Integrity, Safety, and Health (FISH) Standard for Crew, a third-party accreditation for labor practices on wild-capture fishing vessels, announced it has applied to the Consumer Goods Forum’s Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative (SSCI).
The SSCI provides consumer guidance benchmarking of third-party audits, monitoring, and certification schemes. It covers sustainability requirements and relevant verification practices.
“FISH has worked to align itself with the SSCI benchmark for at-sea operations and is pleased to begin this process. The SSCI benchmarking process does the important work of illustrating to the marketplace those schemes that are robust and credible, characteristics which we firmly believe FISH possesses,” FISH Standard Board of Directors and Brim Chief Human Resources Officer Fridrik Fridriksson said.
The recent FISH standard was published in 2021, and is available for all sizes of fleets and vessels. It was developed with input by small- and large-scale harvesters, processors, retailers, and restaurant groups, in collaboration with several nonprofit groups.
FISH completed the first step in the SSCI recognition process by submitting an application under the SSCI’s at-sea operations scope. The SSCI process includes a self-evaluation or self-assessment by the scheme, followed up with a review by an independent expert, office visits, and a public consultation.
The at-sea operations scope is a collaboration between the Consumer Goods Forum's SSCI and the Global Sustainable Seafood Initiative, a public-private partnership working to drive more sustainable seafood for the preservation of the oceans. The collaboration aims to develop a social compliance benchmark tool for the seafood industry.
The SSCI benchmark includes a social criterion with several key elements related to labor standards: health and safety, working hours, wages, benefits, and ethical terms of employment. This criterion is a set of expectations from industry on what makes third-party auditing, monitoring, and certification schemes verified and was developed by Consumer Goods Forum members, external stakeholders, intergovernmental organizations, and NGOs
The Consumer Goods Forum is composed of more than 400 retailers, manufacturers, service providers, and stakeholders from 70 countries as a global parity-based (equal) industry network.
Photo courtesy of The Fish Standard
