We want our customers to be confident that everyone who helps to make our products is treated with dignity and respect, in safe and fair workplaces.
Our Approach
We are committed to upholding the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and have aligned our approach to addressing human rights risk against this global standard.
Our Ethical Trading Policy and Ethical Trading Code remain at the heart of our approach to monitoring, managing and mitigating human rights risk in our supply chain. Please find Mandarin version here.
All suppliers are required to comply with our Ethical Trading code. We recognise our shared responsibility with suppliers to improve labour standards in our supply chains and are committed to increasing transparency of our supplier relations in order to make it easier to work with us. We also have additional, supporting policies in place to manage specific topics such as the responsible remediation of child labour, the management of homeworkers and the use of shared buildings.
Stakeholders
Collaboration with external partners plays a key role in our programme as the issues we face are often complex and complicated. Morrisons has been actively engaged with the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) since 2015, and were confirmed as full members in 2018.Membership enables us to join forces with other businesses, trade unions, and civil society organisations to support wider advocacy and drive positive change in our supply chains.
Further detail on all collaborative work and engagement with multi-stakeholder initiatives can be found on our Collaborative Working Blog
Suppliers
We take our responsibilities to suppliers seriously and have established ways of working that enable us to build strong collaborative relationships. We have demonstrated a continued effort to purchase fairly and responsibly through a commitment to our obligations under the Groceries Supply Code of Practice (GSCOP), and are consistently one of the most improved UK supermarkets. Further details can be found in the “Working with Suppliers” section of our most recent Annual Report
We also fund a number of initiatives that provide free training and resources for our suppliers to support their own responsible sourcing programmes. Find out more about our stance on modern slavery here
Risk Assessment
We have an established approach to assessing risk in our global supply chains which is continuously reviewed to take account of emerging challenges and updated information sources.
We are members of the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex) and utilise their platform and tools to understand and assess key areas of risk in our own-brand supply chain. All suppliers and sites in scope of our policy must hold active membership of Sedex, maintain an up to date Self Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ) and link to us through the platform.
Results
To increase understanding of our exposure to risk in the lower tiers of our supply chain, in 2021 we commissioned an independent assessment to identify and prioritise our highest risk commodities and geographies. The research focused on 6 key themes: modern slavery, child labour, discrimination, low wages, water scarcity and deforestation:
Through this process we have identified 15 priority higher risk products to focus our mitigation and improvement activity over the next 3-5 years:
We have completed human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) for coffee which can be found here: