Unilever Global Change location
In our operations, and through all our business relationships, everything we do is underpinned by an unfaltering commitment to respect and promote human rights. We’re respecting and promoting human rights in three main ways: in our business by upholding our values and standards; with our suppliers and partners throughout Responsible Partner Policy; and through advocacy and collaboration to drive industry-wide change.
We remained focused on implementing action plans related to our salient human rights issues.
Our RSP compliance rate decreased slightly versus 2021 due to supply chain disruption and labour shortages.
We strive to conduct our business in line with the UN Guiding Principles (UNGPs) on Business and Human Rights by identifying, preventing, mitigating and accounting for human rights risks and issues. We continue to make progress addressing our eight salient human rights issues. In 2022, our main focus was on eradicating forced labour, ending harassment and fair wages.
We continued to tackle the risk of migrant worker exploitation, including through implementing effective grievance mechanisms in Thailand, Malaysia, North Africa and the Gulf region, where we jointly sponsored with industry partners training for over 80 businesses on tackling the risk of migrant worker exploitation. Working with industry peers, AIM-Progress, the Consumer Goods Forum Human Rights Coalition, we also launched new practical guidance on the repayment of recruitment fees to workers, to support corporate action against forced labour, specifically debt bondage.
Our work on ending harassment continued with the launch of a Gender Equity Framework designed to address gender discrimination in our agriculture, manufacturing and women-led last-mile distribution networks. In partnership with the UN’s End Violence against Women initiative, we also worked directly with suppliers to understand how to mitigate the risks and impacts of gender-based violence and harassment. This included a capability-training session for 91 strategic suppliers in Mexico and Brazil and the cascade of a gender integration e-learning module for over 2,000 suppliers in India and Indonesia. We are using technology across a number of initiatives. For example, we have partnered with a blockchain technology business called diginex, to help suppliers identify where gender equality or women’s empowerment programmes would be most beneficial, and to help mitigate harassment and gender-based violence.
We are committed to ensuring that everyone who directly provides goods and services to Unilever will earn a living wage or income by 2030. In 2022, our focus was on ensuring a living wage was being paid to workers at our collaborative manufacturing sites. Additionally, our Responsible Partner Policy now includes a future mandatory requirement for suppliers to pay a living wage to their workers. Read more on living wage and fair pay.
We expect our suppliers to conduct business with high standards of integrity, human rights and environmental sustainability. The proportion of spend from suppliers who met the requirements of our Responsible Sourcing Policy was 76% in 2022, a slight fall versus 2021 due to supply chain disruptions, resource constraints in the social audit service industry, and labour shortages for remediation activities – which impacted compliance rates.
To reflect the evolving nature of our third parties and value chain, in December 2022 we published our Responsible Partner Policy, which replaces the Responsible Sourcing Policy and the Responsible Business Partner Policy. The new policy has a broader scope and includes requirements such as minimising waste, safeguarding nature and protecting personal data, as well as defining longer-term future mandatory requirements on reducing GHG emissions and paying living wages.
