People in Supply Chains
We want to enable everyone in our supply chains to realise their fundamental human rights. We believe that by championing the voices of workers and building strong relationships across our supply chains, we can create lasting value for both the Partnership and the people we work with, in support of our business Purpose.
Commitments
- Positively impact the livelihoods of over 200,000 workers in our supply chains;
- Invest £1 million into climate and community resilience programmes;
- Enable everyone in our supply chains to realise their fundamental human rights.
Highlights
Mission Statement: To protect the rights and champion the voices of workers in our supply chains.
Waitrose Foundation
£2.5 million
generated to support projects in the communities from which we source.
In 2024, the Foundation continued scaling its most successful programmes, such as microloans and energy-efficient cookstoves in Kenya and on-farm early learning facilities in South Africa. In Costa Rica, our pineapple growing communities benefited from access to healthcare screening programmes, financial education workshops and bursaries for further education. Find out more.
Better Jobs
1,016 workers
across 11 factories benefitted from the Better Jobs China resilience project.
In India and China, the Better Jobs projects are supporting workers and managers to address a range of important issues, such as work-life pressures, resilience, gender inequality, discrimination and gender-based violence, while establishing and improving grievance mechanisms.
Hand-Woven Rugs
101 rug workers
engaged, bringing factory employees and managers closer together.
In partnership with the Association for Stimulating Know-how (ASK India), the John Lewis hand-woven rugs project aims to set up worker committees, laying foundations that allow for more open dialogue between managers and employees. This year, we conducted sessions and follow-up activity that engaged 101 factory employees across seven factories.
Climate Resilience
50,000 farmers and workers
worldwide supported through our Foundation climate resilience programme.
Over the past year, we’ve continued investing in our climate resilience programme, funded by the Waitrose Foundation, that helps farmers tackle climate uncertainty. We’ve now committed £780,000 of our £1 million target, with projects supporting over 50,000 workers in four countries to adapt to changing climates and improve their livelihoods.
Awards
Just Transition to Net Zero Award - Waitrose Foundation Climate Resilience Programme, edie Net Zero Awards 2024
Homeworker guidelines
In 2024, we developed a set of global implementation guidelines for homeworkers. This practical guide enables the Partnership to work more effectively with our direct suppliers to identify and support decent working conditions for homeworkers. Our approach promotes long-term social improvements and prosperity across our supply chain and the wider community. The guidelines provide a clear framework, processes and tools to help supply chain partners understand their roles and responsibilities towards human rights in homeworking settings.
Progress
Enhanced due diligence
We continue to act following the impact assessments we conducted into our tea and cotton supply chains. For tea, we’re progressing our work to improve the resilience of smallholder tea farmers. This includes completing the pilot of the Leadership for Life course that provides households with training on financial literacy and climate change resilience. For cotton, we’re commencing work in partnership with The Centre for Child Rights and Business to understand the risks related to child labour within the Egyptian cotton sector.
Improving transparency
We’ve increased visibility checks at factories throughout our supply chain. We aim to visit 100% of our tier 1 suppliers in China, Malaysia and Vietnam. Up to January 2025, we visited 462 factories, representing approximately 96%.
Improving livelihoods
Our human rights programme and action, through initiatives such as the Waitrose Foundation and Better Jobs projects, support our ambition to improve the livelihoods of more than 200,000 workers. We are making good progress to reach this target by the end of 2025.
Challenges
We’re aware that ongoing global political instability and the changing climate continue to disrupt many supply chains and affect patterns of labour migration. It’s important for us to ensure that we have a process in place that makes us ready to deal with these and other challenges as they arise. We must keep monitoring a range of risks and work closely with suppliers to understand the impact of our business decisions and where workers’ rights may be at risk.
Following a difficult year for Bangladesh, we continue to support our suppliers and workers there. Recognising that 2024 has been a year of transition for the country, we have been guided by ETI’s Expectations for Responsible Business Conduct for companies that source from Bangladesh. Human Rights Report and Modern Slavery Statement.
In 2025, we’ll be proud to celebrate 20 years of the Waitrose Foundation and look forward to highlighting the impact of the Foundation’s work across our farming communities.
Looking Forward
Our programme work will continue to address issues such as worker-paid recruitment fees and gender-based discrimination and harassment within our supply chains.
We’re working with the Ethical Trading Initiative on programmes looking at how to address these challenges in some of our key supply chains, including East African flowers and South African citrus.
We’ve been working on a first-of-its-kind initiative in partnership with our supply chain to understand the experience of workers on long-line tuna vessels. A summary of our findings will be published in 2025.
More broadly, our work to improve the experience of workers within the fishing sector is also ongoing. We continue to promote the Responsible Fishing Vessel Standard in the UK and are running a pilot project to bring the Just Good Work app into the fishing sector, helping to better educate migrant fishers about their rights.
Case Study
Enabling hand-woven rug workers’ rights
In 2018, we partnered with the Association for Stimulating Know-how (ASK India) to conduct supply chain mapping and factory risk assessments for 10 hand-woven rug suppliers in India. Since then, we have worked to empower factory workers so that they have a voice on important issues.
When our partnership began, ASK India visited 17 tier 1 factories, as well as several tier 2 units. During their assessments, they identified risks that included a lack of effective worker committees and gaps in health and safety practices.
Paused in 2020/21 due to the pandemic, the programme recommenced in 2022 with a second round of factory risk assessments. With the findings largely repeated, ASK India worked with the factories to develop site-level capacity-building plans. The plans included developing worker committees by involving workers and management in games and mock meetings to improve collective understanding, as well as strengthening grievance systems by relaunching grievance policies and upskilling worker representatives so that they were able to record and mediate grievances.
These sessions took place at the start of 2024 and were attended by 101 employees across seven participating factories, with management agreeing to co-create an action plan with ASK India to implement their learnings.
Eight months later, our follow-up evaluation found that five of the factories had significantly enhanced the roles of the new committees and four had already implemented over 50% of their action plan.
These activities are playing a positive part in improving the dialogue between workers and managers and helping to create mechanisms so that workers have more of a voice on issues that are important to them.
This process has reinforced the message that, in the face of many competing priorities for factory management teams, important topics such as these can be implemented effectively if engagement is consistent. We’ll keep working to ensure these improvements are maintained and action plans get completed as we support the factories to continue their conversations with tier 2 suppliers.
“Earlier I had limited knowledge on labour law, about the Works Committee, Grievance and Internal Complaint Committee…after having attended the training, my learning has improved. The training was interactive and informative. It was a very good session.” - Factory management member
“The session was really empowering for me. I will be able to encourage workers to share their grievances and our Committee shall resolve it effectively.” - Factory worker member
