Evolving risks
To champion human rights, we need to understand the risks that lie ahead of us as well as managing and mitigating our biggest risks today. Socio-economic shifts caused by climate change, conflict, and health crises are known to exacerbate human rights risks, particularly for those who are most vulnerable. We recognise that businesses need to understand and proactively tackle the changing risk landscape.
Stranded workers and communities
The livelihoods of the people that support our value chains and their wider communities are increasingly at risk as a result of climate change as well as technological change and automation. It will become increasingly important to make sure that interventions are provided to make sure that workers and communities are not ‘stranded’ by impacts such as prolonged drought or advancing technologies
Land rights
Indigenous People & local communities have rights enshrined under international law. Business activities can inadvertently cause these groups to lose rights to lands and resources. By ensuring consultation and consent under the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) model, Sainsbury’s aims to ensure that land is sustainably managed for future generations.
Rights and access to water
Climate change and water intensive industries and lifestyles access to water a growing human rights concern in the coming years. Water availability is becoming less predictable in many places which could bring devastating effects on people’s health and livelihoods. At Sainsbury’s we are determined to be responsible stewards of water and to champion access to water as a human right.
Precarious work
Driven by technology and new business models such as the ‘gig economy’, precarious – or insecure - work is growing dramatically. Precarious work rises in times of business uncertainty and disruption and is often concentrated in low-wage sectors or amongst vulnerable groups. Businesses need to better understand precarious work as growing global issues and evolving business models are expected to negatively impact workers’ job security.
Child labour
Multiple crises, including Covid-19, conflict and climate change, threaten to reverse years of progress on child labour. Child labour is inextricably linked to decent work and wages. As the cost of living continues to increase, sending children to work can be a coping strategy for people without an adequate income to support their families.
As a responsible business, we will monitor these evolving risks, and identify ways to manage and mitigate issues with our suppliers and partners and continue to look for other evolving threats to human rights.
Read more about our evolving risks in our saliency report
Traceability and transparency
We source thousands of products from the UK and around the world. It is important to have visibility of the many different businesses involved in the production of our goods, from the original raw materials, to manufacturing and transportation. Understanding the different actors involved is critical if we are to recognise and anticipate risks posed to people and to the planet, so that these can be prevented and mitigated and harms remediated.
We are working hard to map our supply chain beyond our tier 1 suppliers (businesses that we deal with directly), prioritising where we know there is greatest risk to people and the environment. This is informed by a risk analysis of our key raw materials which, takes into account both social and environmental risks. We collect data on supplier site locations and the number of workers, as well as data on the proportion of women and migrant workers in the workforce and the presence of a worker representation mechanisms such as trade unions or worker committees. Examining this data will help us better identify and consider the needs of vulnerable groups when setting strategies and taking action.
Transparency is critical for us to live up to our vision of being the most trusted retailer. We are committed to being open and transparent about where we source from, as well as the challenges we face, and the actions we take to identify and address risks and prevent harm. Disclosing where we source from also helps workers at those sites to advocate for their rights and alert us to when things go wrong, so we can work with our peers and civil society to correct them and enable access to remedy. In order to further improve transparency, we will be refreshing our site lists for all business areas on an annual basis.
Tier 1 sites for GM
Tier 1 sites for Food
Tier 1 sites for Clothing
Tier 1 sites for Goods not for Resale
Increasing transparency in our supply chain
Working in collaboration
The global challenges we face require collective action; we cannot solve these on our own.
We are committed to working with credible experts to better understand the risks people in our value chain face, and to determine how best these risks and impacts can be mitigated and remediated.
We know that labour and human rights risks are systemic and require collective action based on an understanding of root causes. To make progress on issues such as pay and working conditions, we need to collaborate and work pre-competitively with peers to raise standards and to use our collective leverage to advocate for change, including with governments, standards -setters and certification schemes.
We do much of our work to address labour rights issues in high-risk supply chains by working with other organisations in multi-stakeholder initiatives. We are a founding member of the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI) and participate in many of its working groups alongside trade unions, non-governmental organisations and other consumer goods businesses. We are active members of The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) Sustainable Supply Chain Initiative (SSCI), a global benchmarking initiative for third-party audit and certification programmes, sitting on the Steering Committee overseeing development of social, management and environment criteria. Through our policies and practices, we also support the CGF’s Human Rights Coalition – Working to End Forced Labour and Forced Labour Priority Industry Principles, tackling three of the most problematic employment practices that can lead to forced labour.
Industry collaboration helps to align and streamline information and standards that businesses require from their supply chains. Such collaboration also helps by reducing duplication and sharing insight and intelligence on shared risks, which maximizes our collective efforts and resources.
Putting people at the centre of solutions
We recognise that workers' ability to voice concerns and shape workplace practices goes hand in hand with creating resilient businesses that provide decent jobs. We are committed to supporting workers’ rights to freedom of association and enabling access to remedy.
Effective worker representation, through trade unions, or independent, democratically elected worker committees, is critical to helping workers understand and protect their rights and improve their working conditions. For example, worker representation can help to prevent health and safety risks and achieve living wages through collective bargaining agreements. Additionally, engaging with rightsholders, or their representatives, is important to make sure that remediation is appropriate and takes into account workers’ needs.
As founding members of ETI, we work with trade unions, our industry peers and non-governmental organisations to connect with impacted stakeholders. Since 2014 we have participated in key working groups to help advance effective social dialogue and worker representation. We recognise the limitations of audits to uncover certain risks and assess the effectiveness of measures. To improve engagement of workers within our due diligence processes, we are investing in worker voice programmes to hear first-hand from workers about the challenges they face, so that any potential violations can be prevented and remedied. Given the barriers that some people, such as women or migrant workers, face in advocating for their rights we seek to actively involve vulnerable groups in solution
Responsible purchasing practices
We are committed to establishing long-term, stable and fair relationships with our suppliers. This is key to delivering consistently high quality products to customers, to meet our human rights obligations and help our suppliers to do the same.
We recognise the impact that purchasing practices can have in shaping workers’ conditions and pay, and the importance of accounting for production and labour costs, providing fair payment terms, accurate volume forecasting and adequate lead times.
We pride ourselves on having good supplier relationships and working collaboratively to address concerns when they are uncovered. We are committed to supporting suppliers to improve their practices and rewarding suppliers for doing the right thing to protect people.
To better understand the effectiveness of our approach, the annual Advantage Survey gathers anonymous feedback from our suppliers on our working practices so that we can drive continuous improvements and improve how we work with suppliers.