Addressing Human Rights Risks

As a purpose-led business that aims to put people and the planet before profit, upholding the human rights of those who help make and sell our products and services is extremely important to us.
 

Our Responsible Sourcing Code of Practice (RSCOP) sets out our commitment to workers’ rights and our expectations of our suppliers regarding issues such as pay, working hours, and child labour. It mirrors the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) Base Code. Clause one of the RSCOP states employment must be freely chosen, with no forced, bonded or involuntary labour. 
 

The RSCOP is the first point in a journey of continuous improvement within our supply chains and is supported by strong governance on how we are managing and mitigating the risk of modern slavery and other human rights issues within our supply chains. Embedding both the RSCOP and strong governance of human rights issues in our supply chains is critical to enabling us to meet and exceed our responsibilities as a retailer and the requirements of the Modern Slavery Act.
 

There are a number of approaches we take to address issues of modern slavery across our supply chains, from training of Partners, working in partnership with experts and taking targeted and collaborative action. For more details, please refer to the most recent Human Rights and Modern Slavery report.

Robust grievance mechanisms are important for workers to report any issues they witness or encounter within the workplace. The mechanisms for raising grievances and the quality of proposed remedies are not always the same for every worker. For example, the success of grievance mechanisms may be limited by language barriers, contractual issues for temporary and agency workers, and trust barriers for those who have had their grievances handled poorly in the past. Women often face additional barriers when accessing effective grievance mechanisms; for example, they may be restricted from joining a trade union simply because of their gender.
 

Workers in our supply chains are encouraged to report any issues they encounter in the workplace through site-level grievance mechanisms or to use external hotlines, such as Stronger Together, or other third-party organisations. In the UK, we encourage our suppliers to promote the Modern Slavery Helpline to workers and to ensure workers have access to apps which provide them with grievance channels, including the Just Good Work App.
 

The Partnership supports suppliers to strengthen their site-level grievance mechanisms whilst involving workers in their design and implementation. We particularly recognise that gender-related grievances may be sensitive. Where there are restrictions on women joining trade unions, or there are few or no female workers’ representatives, suppliers must ensure that views and opinions of women are properly advanced and addressed. To strengthen the grievance-raising process for women, we encourage our suppliers to have union representation, or an equivalent, at all sites, as it is usually a site's internal grievance mechanism that is the most effective at resolving worker concerns.
 

We are currently undertaking a number of projects that aim to improve access to effective grievance mechanisms and improve remedial action for issues or concerns raised in our high-risk supply chains. Find out more in our 2024 Human Rights Report & Modern Slavery Statement.

Even in countries where equality is a legal requirement, women still face more barriers than men. Poverty, discrimination, access to education and violence against women are major barriers to opportunity. Women often lack the protection of basic rights and laws. As nearly half of the workers in our supply chains are women, it is important for us to play our part in combating gender inequality. Women are often in lower-paid positions and often have more precarious employment than men. Although women work in a variety of the Partnership’s supply chains, the proportion of male to female workers differs depending on the tier of the supply chain, the country, and the industry. Women also often make up the majority of the workforce in home working situations.   
   

Although we have increased our own advocacy work for women’s rights, we know there is still more we can do. We have worked with various implementation partners, from Farm Africa to ActionAid and The Centre for Child Rights and Business, to deliver informative and beneficial programmes for female workers in and around our supply chains. But the work to address challenges faced by women does not stop here. We are committed to continuing our work around understanding gender balance in our supply chains and how we can promote equality and improve women's opportunities.
 

Our supply chain programmes – the Waitrose Foundation and our Better Jobs programme – also provide support for female workers. 
 

The Waitrose Foundation delivers programmes to support women’s economic empowerment and provides training and capability building across the ten countries in which it operates. 

Through our Better Jobs survey, we have applied a ‘gender lens’ to help us understand how gender differences can impact how people experience working conditions, and how this might be redressed. 
 

Since 2022, the John Lewis Partnership has been a signatory to the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs). The Principles present six steps that businesses can take to advance and empower women in the workplace and are helping us achieve our goals by guiding our journey and facilitating knowledge sharing to ensure gender-inclusive supply chains.

Homeworking can really benefit workers, giving them the opportunity to have maximum flexibility and support balancing work and care responsibilities. Products made by homeworkers are also valuable to the Partnership as they are mostly handmade and can often include intricate and traditional skills.

The Partnership acknowledges, and welcomes, the existence of homeworkers in the supply chain, but recognises that working conditions in homeworking situations can be poor. We take a proactive approach to ensuring transparency around homeworking within our supply chains. We communicate our position on homeworkers throughout our company, and to suppliers; we commit to ensuring the disclosure of homeworkers in the supply chain will not lead to the relocation of work or cancellation of orders; and we work with our suppliers to ensure working conditions for homeworkers are fair and in line with the principles laid out in RSCOP.

Smallholder farmers are imperative to delivering the range of food we stock at the Partnership. Many of our best-loved products, such as tea, coffee, chocolate and vegetables, are grown by smallholder farmers. However, these farmers are often the most vulnerable because of low incomes, and a lack of access to finance and agricultural expertise. We also know that these farmers are likely to be among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. 
 

The Partnership believes that farmers and workers in our supply chain deserve to earn a fair price for their work, which is why we’ve supported Fairtrade, and have done since 1994, when we became one of the first retailers to stock Fairtrade products. 
 

Through the Waitrose Foundation, we are working to increase the resilience of smallholder farmers. For example, we have provided new irrigation equipment that pumps water all day to outgrowers in Gambia, solar-powered cooling stations in Kenya to keep produce higher quality for longer and which increases incomes, and microloans to support smallholders to diversify their incomes.
 

In 2022, we committed to investing £1 million in programmes that support farmers and workers to adapt to changing climates and become more resilient by 2025. We’re currently delivering five projects across four countries to improve farmer livelihoods. Learn more about the work of the Waitrose Foundation.
 

Decent wages and a fair system of value distribution are also important to ensuring smallholder farmers can cover their basic living costs, plan for emergencies and live a happy life. One example of our activity to improve smallholder income is our partnership with IDH – The Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH) to identify the living wage in our banana supply chain, which is currently made up of a number of larger plantations, alongside smallholder farmers. This work will enable us to understand the gap between current incomes and living wage, and move towards closing this gap. 
 

We cannot solve all of the issues smallholder farmers face alone. That's why efforts are also required by governments to ensure that small-scale farmers are resilient and prosperous, earn a living income and receive a fair share of the value accumulated in food supply chains. 
 

We’ll continue to use our voice to advocate for improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers across all of our supply chains.

We are already witnessing the devastating impact that climate change is having on global supply chains and surrounding communities. The Partnership commits to reducing our negative impact and has already set a number of ambitious targets. However, we recognise that people and the planet are interconnected, and we are committed to ensuring that the Partnership’s climate mitigation strategy and associated decision does not come at the expense of the existing farmers and workers who supply us. 
 

As part of this commitment, we have worked with government and NGO partners to research and understand the potential positive and negative impacts of our net zero ambitions on women workers in our East African supply chain. Using the findings from the research and a needs assessment, we’ve delivered projects to improve climate resilience whilst enabling greater economic empowerment and leadership roles for women. We aim to scale up our learnings across our wider supply base.
 

In 2022, we committed to investing £1 million in programmes that support farmers and workers to adapt to changing climates and become more resilient by 2025. We are currently delivering  five projects across four countries to improve farmer livelihoods. Learn more about the work of the Waitrose Foundation.