The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is an international independent standards organization that helps businesses, governments and other organizations understand and communicate their action and impact in the areas of climate change, human rights and corruption. GRI provides the world's most widely used sustainability reporting standards (the so-called GRI Standards)
The cross-border social dialogue component
GRI's governance bodies and working groups have global representation across constituency groups, namely: business enterprises, investment institutions, mediating institutions, labour organizations and civil society organizations. Trade union organizations’ representatives sit together with companies’ representatives in various bodies of the GRI, such as:
- The GRI Global Sustainability Standards Board (GSSB), which is an independent body responsible for setting globally accepted standards for sustainability reporting, in line with a formally defined process. The GSSB terms of referenceprescribe that two members are drawn from the labour organization constituency (currently, one International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) representative and one representative of an Australian trade union) and five from the business enterprise constituency (see the list of members).
- The GRI Supervisory Board, where currently two seats are held by two former trade union representatives and two by business representatives. The Board is the highest governance body within the current governance structure. The Board’s members are selected and appointed based on their track record in the field of sustainable development as well as on the insights they can provide to advance GRI’s mission.
- The GRI’s Stakeholder Council, where three union representatives (from different Global Union Federations) sit together with 17 companies’ representatives (see the full list). The Council is the main stakeholder forum within GRI’s governance structure, which advises the Board on strategic matters. The Council's key governance functions include making recommendations on future policy, business planning and activity.
- The GRI Independent Appointments Committee (IAC), which is made up of three Board members and three Stakeholder Council members and has primary responsibility for appointing persons to the GRI GSSB and the GRI Due Process Oversight Committee (DPOC). In the terms of reference (ToRs) of the IAC, it is mentioned that “when making nominations to the IAC for labour representatives on the GSSB the GRI Board, Stakeholder Council and GSSB should do so on the basis of nominations received from the Council of Global Unions.” Currently, a representative of the ILO Bureau for Workers’ Activities (ACTRAV) represents trade unions organizations (see the full list).
- The GRI Working Groups (see for example the Working Groupfor Oil and Gas and Coal, the multi-stakeholder project working group for the Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fishing or for the Mining sector standard Working Group), where representatives from Global Union Federations, national unions organizations and companies representatives sit together.
- Cross-border social dialogue also takes place in some ad hoc processes, such as for the revision of the universal standards, where a multi-stakeholder technical committee of experts included two members from the labour constituency – one from the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) and one from the ITUC.