Royal Distribution recognizes its corporate responsibility to respect human rights and the importance of showing that we are taking the necessary steps to fulfill this social obligation. We do this by striving to operate responsibly along the entire value chain; by safeguarding the rights of our own employees and those of the workers who manufacture our products through our Labor Rights Charter and ‘Workplace Standards’; and by applying our influence to affect change wherever human rights issues are linked to our business activities.

Since its inception, our human and labor rights program has been built on the back of intense stakeholder outreach and engagement: seeking to understand and define the most salient issues to address as a company. Through those engagements we have identified the following as salient issues for our human rights program and the focus for our human rights due diligence efforts: freedom of association and collective bargaining, working hours, health and safety, fair wages, child labor, forced labor, resource consumption, water (including chemical management), access to grievance mechanisms, diversity, mega sporting events, procurement, product safety, as well as data protection and privacy security.

Recent highlights from our work include the launch of our modern slavery outreach program, the publication of our approach to support human rights defenders, our participation in a pilot to create an international corporate human rights benchmark for business globally and our ongoing disclosure of cases received through our third-party complaints mechanism, which is part of our long-standing approach to transparency and accountability. Our work has been awarded with leadership positions in the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark and the Know the Chain ranking, recognizing our efforts to manage human rights across our operations, as well as eradicate forced labor and human trafficking from our supply chains.

Core to the human rights approach of Royal Distribution is its commitment to ensuring fair labor practices, fair compensation and safe working conditions in factories throughout its global supply chain. Our active efforts are guided by the Royal Distribution Workplace Standards, our supply chain code of conduct. Royal Distribution regularly rates factories on their ability to comply with these standards by means of conducting announced and unannounced audits through Royal Distribution personnel or an approved external auditor. According to the results, our sourcing and SEA teams jointly decide the course of action, ranging from the definition of training needs or other improvements at the factories to enforcement mechanisms such as sending warning letters or even termination of contracts. Any cases of non-compliance identified during audits are given a certain time frame for remediation.