21 October 2020
In the midst of the pandemic, British insurer Aviva, alongside Scottish insurance company Standard Life Aberdeen, have become the first groups to implement the ‘Living Hours’ model as advocated by the Living Wage Foundation. This means that, unless workers specifically request otherwise, Aviva will guarantee at least 16 hours of work per week. In addition, work schedules will have to be announced at least 4 weeks in advance and workers will be guaranteed payment if there are any cancellations within the 4-week...
26 June 2020
Forty-two new companies have just signed up to this charter, the goal of which since 2016 is to raise female occupancy rates in positions of responsibility within the financial sector (c.f. article No. 9771). At the time of this announcement on 23 June, the government stated that in 2019 the proportion of women in senior management positions had either increased or stabilized in 3 out of 4 signatory companies. In addition, the average proportion of females in senior management rose from 30% in 2017 to 32% in 2019....
15 May 2020
A study by the Center for Global Workers’ Rights (CGWR), at the Pennsylvania State University, published on 27 March has caught the attention of worldwide public opinion. Entitled “Abandoned? The Impact of Covid-19 on Workers and Businesses at the Bottom of Global Garment Supply Chains”, the research – based on feedback from 316 garment suppliers in Bangaldesh (of a total of 2,000) – indicates that since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic more than half of Bangladesh suppliers have had the bulk of their...
15 May 2020
This significant sum – dedicated to the solidarity fund announced on 9 April and created at the end of the same month – was announced on 6 May by Solvay chief executive officer Ilhma Kadri to the Belgian press. The fund was set up to help employees and their relatives who are facing financial difficulties, and not only those placed on short-time working. It is financed first and foremost by the Belgian chemical company’s 30 senior managers and the CEO, who have all agreed to waive 15% of their salary, from...
26 March 2020
On 26 March, during an interview on French radio (RTL), Emmanuel Faber, CEO of the French food group Danone, stated the following commitment on air, “All employment contracts at Danone and all salaries, worldwide, are guaranteed for the next three months.” In addition to not laying off employees because of Covid-19, Danone will cover “all income up to salary level” in the event of recourse to partial unemployment measures, due to supply disruptions in a factory, or the inability of people to...
10 March 2020
While companies with more than 250 staff have until 05 April to comply with the legal requirement to publish their third annual gender pay gap data (c.f. article No. 11073), initial indications from roughly a quarter of these businesses have already started to leak through to the press. One thing standing out from the leaks is that the UK’s dominant financial sector continues to be a laggard. The BBC has calculated that the average salary gap in this sector based on these preliminary numbers has risen to 23.1%...
3 February 2020
On Friday 31 January, French cosmetics group L’Oréal announced the launch of a new employee human rights policy, with which the firm pledges that “every employee’s human rights must be respected, regardless of their job or location”. The policy complements the group’s existing global human rights policy, launched in 2017, and addresses the emerging topic of the living wage and contains a paragraph on employee freedom of expression.
25 November 2019
In a statement published on 21 November, the US tech corporation Intel called on its corporate law departments, located in the US, to consider performance on diversity when using external law firms. In concrete terms, as of 1 January 2021, Intel says it will only use external legal service providers that “meet two diversity criteria: at least 21% of the firm’s US equity partners are women and at least 10% of the firm’s US equity partners are underrepresented minorities (which, for this purpose, we define as...
19 November 2019
On 13 November 2019, after eight months of negotiations, and along with the IndustriALL affiliate, Industrial Workers’ Federation of Myanmar (IWFM), garment and textiles factories in Myanmar, which produce for some twenty brands that are members of the Action, Collaboration, Transformation (ACT) agreement that aims to develop sector based collective bargaining within the large garment producing countries, adopted the Myanmar Freedom of Association (FoA) Guideline. In addition to international guidelines on...
8 November 2019
The School of Management and Law at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, a British NGO, have probed the practices and actions of 20 large German companies in terms of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and respect of human rights. The results (here) are rather gloomy. Although all the companies claim to adhere to high human and ecological standards, not one completely complies with the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Right, decreed by the...
