Respecting Human Rights
At Mars, we seek to promote and respect human rights across our entire value chain.
From veterinarians and factory workers in Chicago to farmers in Côte 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 in line with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights(Opens a new window). Our global human rights team, working with our ethics & compliance team, establishes our human rights policies, strategies and programs, provides guidance to Associates around the world in our business segments, consults with third-party experts and civil society groups, and collaborates with governments, businesses and communities to advance our work.
Human Rights
Our human rights strategy is focused on deploying programs in three areas: in our own operations, with our suppliers, and in extended supply chains.
Our Own Operations
In our own operations, the Responsible Workplace program aims to drive respect for the human rights of all Associates and other workers in our workplaces. 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.
To identify human rights risks and impacts at specific locations, we routinely evaluate our workplaces and take a risk-based approach to prioritize our assessment schedules. We engage independent auditors to assess our workplace human rights performance against local laws and the Mars Responsible Workplace Standard (which is based on the Mars Workplace Code of Conduct). We work to address any non-compliances that may be identified in our workplaces.
Responsible Workplace assessments include assessments of service providers and contingent labor at our sites, given that these populations of workers are often more vulnerable to risks.
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.
Suppliers
We want to work with partners who share our principle-based approach to business. We rely on thousands of first-tier suppliers (suppliers with a direct business relationship with Mars) 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. Mars aims to ensure our tier one suppliers respect human rights in their workplace through policies, identifying potential and actual impacts and evaluating and addressing those risks.
Our work with suppliers 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 and establishes an expectation that suppliers will apply our Supplier Code of Conduct to sub-contractors and cascade its contents down the supply chain. Our Supplier Code of Conduct Guidebook(Opens a new window) 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 use tools to prioritize and assess supplier risk, considering factors such as location and sector. Higher risk suppliers are expected to undergo social compliance audits.
We also support strategic suppliers through our Supplier Advance program. 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, and workplace discrimination.
Extended Supply Chains
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.
We have worked with experts to identify salient human rights issues present across the industry in the extended supply chains of several of our key agricultural materials, including cocoa, rice, fish and palm oil. We prioritize based on risk and focus our actions on creating real impact.
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. We continue to work with partners, peers and customers via industry and multi-stakeholder initiatives such as AIM Progress, the Responsible Business Alliance, the Consumer Goods Forum and the Living Income Community of Practice — with a focus on complex human rights risks such as forced labor and living income.
