Human rights, centre of Unilever’s new policy
By Oghale Mafuru
In a bid to drive social equality, inclusion and human rights advancement, leading Fast Moving Consumers Goods FMCG company, Unilever has announced commitment to the promotion of human rights in the workplace and across its value chain.
The FMCG company while disclosing that the decision is contained in its recent policy ‘Responsible Partner Policy (RPP)’ which aims to create an enabling and secured environment for employees has made it mandatory for partners within the value chain to adopt policies that promotes human rights.
The company said: “At Unilever, we rely on a global ecosystem of over 66,000 partners who supply us with goods and services, or distribute and sell our finished products. Despite our commitment to such a huge network of third parties, we won’t just work with anyone.
“We use our scale and reach to respect and promote human rights by working only with like-minded partners who can meet our terms of trade. Since 2014, we’ve communicated these requirements through our supplier-facing Responsible Sourcing Policy and our distributor and customer-facing Responsible Business Partner Policy. As the demands of people and planet evolve, we’re evolving too, streamlining our efforts and updating our requirements to ensure they continue to advance human rights in today’s world”.
According to Willem Uijen, Chief Procurement Officer of the company, partners are encouraged develop novel initiatives to build on the stipulated minimum standards as defined in the policy to advance the transformational agenda of the company.
The company which revealed that one of the fundamental principles of RPP is fair wages for employees affirmed that it is a mandatory requirement for partners in the future.
He assured that by 2030 all individuals within its value chain will be earning living wages.
“As part of this, we want to see partners paying a living wage, so we’ve made doing so a ‘Future Mandatory Requirement’ which we expect our partners to prepare for.
As a business, we have committed to ensuring everyone who directly provides goods and services to Unilever will earn at least a living wage or a living income by 2030. To support and track partner efforts, we launched the Living Wage/Living Income Promise in 2021, through which we share our own living wage journey and offer guidance to those intent on joining our efforts to improving lives and livelihoods and strengthening business resilience “the company said.
The Responsible Partner Policy (RPP) was launched on 8 December, 2022 in commemoration of the Human Rights Day where the company was ranked first out of 127 companies in the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark, as assessed by the World Benchmarking Alliance.
This 2022 version of the RPP replaces both the 2017 Responsible Sourcing Policy (RSP) and the 2017 Responsible Business Partner Policy (RBPP).
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