Yes, we’re back at the CSR Reporting Blog. Apologies for too long an absence due to so much time working on reporting rather than writing about reporting. But this new GRI brainchild was too good to pass up.
GRI has published exposure drafts for the first phase of its employment and labor standards revision, introducing new and completely unique disclosures. Just when you thought ESRS was enough to mindblow even the most energetic of reporters, GRI has generated 13 original multipart disclosures and revised (expanded) 8 disclosures, all from 5 existing ones. It’s the GRI multi-stakeholder Mary Poppins at work again pulling more metrics out of the bottomless carpet bag.
We are truly in the age of mega mushrooming of metrics, where every new standard adds to the reporting burden in a way that I fail to believe is what's needed to advance sustainable development and protect people, society and the environment. There’s a point at which disclosure becomes dysfunctional rather than constructive. It makes you wonder when we will have a metric for how many times people use the bathroom – broken down by gender, region, employee category (including workers who are not employees) and time spent per visit. Let’s just hope that this disclosure requirement doesn’t include details of bathroom activities.
Despite reverberating declarations of cooperation, collaboration and undying love between the prominent standard setters (notably GRI, IFRS and EFRAG), here we go again: GRI proposes more unique disclosure requirements that do not appear in any other standards (as far as I can ascertain). But don’t worry, I am sure, once the new standards are finalized, GRI will publish an interoperability guide. That will make everything so easy. Not.
(The GRI-ESRS Interoperability Index will need quite some updating.)