Ethical trade and human rights
Supporting our suppliers, workers and the most vulnerable.
Download the 'Ethical trade and human rights' section of the Co-operate Report 2021 (PDF, 927 KB)
Our focus
Our focus is to provide support for our suppliers, work collaboratively to protect the most vulnerable, protect workers and continue to champion resilient livelihoods for everyone in our supply chain.
Our Future of Food ambition commits us to ensuring that the people in our supply chains are secure from end to end. We focus on labour rights, including fair reward, safe and decent working conditions, protection from forced labour, modern slavery and harsh or inhumane treatment.
Supply chain transparency and human rights risks
To meet our Future of Food human rights ambition, during 2021 we continued to focus our work around four strategic priorities:
- driving innovation in due diligence and transparency
- embedding ethical trade into core business activities and winning hearts and minds
- building capacity and resilience in our supply base to address the underlying causes of human rights issues
- tackling modern slavery and mitigating human rights risks
These four key strategic areas will remain a focus of our work into 2022 and beyond.
Monitoring labour standards and driving due diligence and transparency
We’re founder members of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) and we have adopted the ETI Base Code, which is founded on the conventions of the International Labour Organisation and is an internationally recognised code of labour practice.
We drive improvements to working conditions, making sure that the workers who make our products are treated responsibly and ethically.
Building capacity and resilience in our Co-op Food supply base
Our Food business has a programme of supplier workshops in key sourcing countries. These are designed to:
- raise awareness of our values, expectations and strategy
- provide guidance on local labour law and our Sound Sourcing Code of Conduct requirements
- share best practice in addressing common labour standards issues
Read more about our work to champion the best labour standards in our supply chains.
We supported 82 supplier events and webinars reaching 7,208 participants globally