Collaboration is Critical to Promoting and Respecting Human Rights in the Value Chain of Tomorrow
We believe that the global economy—and global businesses like ours—needs to do much more to ensure that work empowers people. We believe we can, and should, play a role in increasing opportunity for people to thrive in the workplaces and communities we touch.
At Mars, we seek to promote and respect human rights across our entire value chain. From factory workers in Chicago to farmers in Cote D’Ivoire, we believe everyone touched by our business should be treated with dignity, fairness and respect.
Our work is guided by Mars’ global Human Rights Policy and Protecting Children Action Plan, in line with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Our global human rights team, working with our ethics & compliance team, establishes our human rights policies, strategies and programs, provides guidance to colleagues around the world in our business segments, and consults with third-party experts and civil society groups to advance our work.
Our Human Rights Steering Committee, comprised of Mars senior leaders, meets regularly to review our progress, challenges and opportunities and our Board of Directors is periodically updated.
We believe collaboration is critical to making progress in addressing complex and systemic human rights issues. We work with governments, businesses and communities to advance shared goals across our value chain - to Make More Responsible Decisions, Together.
Our Human Rights Framework
In the countries where we do business, and across our value chain, we are making progress promoting and respecting human rights—but we also face many challenges.
Our human rights strategy is focused on deploying programs in three areas: in our own operations through our Responsible Workplace program, with our suppliers through our Next Generation Supplier program, and in our extended supply chains through our Sustainable Sourcing programs.
Responsible Workplace
- Our Responsible Workplace program aims to drive respect for the human rights of all Associates and other workers in our workplaces. This includes seeking to ensure that their human rights are respected and that we are engaged with the communities in which we operate. Our Workplace Code of Conduct details our human rights standards and expectations for our own Associates, including forced and child labor prohibitions based on ILO Conventions 138 and 182.
- We routinely evaluate our factories. To identify human rights risks and impacts at specific locations, we take a risk-based approach to prioritize our assessment schedules. We engage independent auditors, expert in labor issues, to assess our workplace human rights performance against local laws and the Mars Responsible Workplace Standard. We work with our sites to address non-compliances that are identified.
- As part of this program we:
- Train Associates on our global Guide to Ethics & Compliance, which explains our human rights values and expectations.
- Ensure all Associates have access to a local Ombudsman to whom they can confidentially and anonymously report workplace issues.
- Provide independent auditors with access to our workplaces to assess our human rights performance and we work with our sites to address issues that are identified.
Next Generation Supplier Program
We want to work with partners who share our principle-based approach to business. We rely on thousands of first-tier suppliers around the world to keep our business thriving—they supply us with critical materials such as ingredients for our products as well as essential goods and services. Our Next Generation Supplier program aims to ensure that our Tier-One suppliers respect human rights in their workplaces.
Our Next Generation Supplier program is founded on our Supplier Code of Conduct. The Mars Supplier Code of Conduct articulates our social, ethical and environmental expectations for first-tier suppliers. It contains globally aligned standards and is rooted in international law. Our Supplier Code of Conduct Guidebook provides guidance and capacity building for suppliers, including good practice examples for developing management systems to identify, remediate and prevent forced labor, child labor, and other human rights risks.
We assess the sustainability performance and existing social compliance audit results of prioritized suppliers using the EcoVadis online platform, leveraging recognized third –party tools while also unlocking increased visibility and broader insights.
We support strategic suppliers, as they advance performance through our Supplier Advance programs, third party experts assess these suppliers and build their capacity to prevent and address significant issues, such as responsible recruitment, health and safety, child labor, gender equality, and workplace discrimination. Supplier Advance programs include workers regularly on-site, including those from contingent labor and service providers. The model leverages the expertise of external advisors, including our global strategic human rights partner Verité.
Human Rights in Sustainable Sourcing
We are seeking to advance respect for human rights in our extended agricultural supply chains, which reach past our first-tier suppliers all the way to the farm or fishery level. Some of the most serious human rights issues in our value chain may be at the farthest ends of our agricultural supply chains, where our influence and visibility is typically low. Learn more in our Human Rights Position Statement(Opens a new window).
We have worked with experts to identify salient human rights issues present across the industry in the extended supply chains of a number of our key agricultural materials, including cocoa, fish and palm oil. In consultation with human rights experts, and a thorough review of publicly-available data, we have identified forced labor and child labor as the human rights issues that may pose the most severe risk to people in our extended supply chains. Even as we work to advance respect for all rights, we place special emphasis on these salient issues and we prioritize actions that reach the most vulnerable people.
As we seek to understand the nature, extent and root causes of these and other human rights issues in these supply chains, we are collaborating with others who share our principles, and we are investing in joint efforts to accomplish our shared goals. Collaboration is critical to advancing respect for human rights at this level in extended supply chains, as sustained progress is only possible when industry, government, civil society and communities take action.
Industry Action
We are taking action in our business and supply chains to advance the Consumer Goods Forum’s (CGF) Priority Industry Principles(Opens a new window) on forced labor. Mars led the development of these principles as co-chair of the CGF’s forced labor taskforce, as we believe industry-wide focus and action on this issue is urgently needed. The Principles align with our existing human rights approach at Mars, and they provide us and others with an opportunity to deepen and strengthen our work as we seek to identify and address forced labor. We look forward to using our voice and our actions to drive progress on this issue together with others in industry who share this goal.
Global, Strategic Partner: Verité
We are proud of our global, strategic partnership with leading human rights and labor nonprofit Verité. Our long-term collaboration aims to advance respect for human rights and improve the lives of the most vulnerable workers in global supply chains relevant to our business. Building on our existing human rights strategy, Verité is advising and supporting work across our own operations with our first-tier suppliers and in our extended supply chain. We work across three pillars: Action, Insight and Dialogue. Read more from our announcement at the Skoll World Forum(Opens a new window). The Management System Roadmap(Opens a new window) is an example of one of the tools we have co-created, to help suppliers understand and improve systems to monitor, address and prevent human rights risks in extended supply chains.
Learn more about our partnership with Verité(Opens a new window).
