Functioning industrial relations
and collective bargaining are key to
achieving fair living wages and good
working conditions. Workers must
be free to form or join a trade union
and be able to bargain collectively in
areas such as wages. While we are
realistic about the fact that there is
a long way to go until fair and functioning
industrial relations processes
are in place all around the world, we
want to set an example for our industry.
Our goal is for all of our strategic
supplier factories to have democratically
elected and functional workplace
representation in place by 2018
at the latest.
Given widely varying pre-conditions
from market to market, we will apply
locally adapted approaches to achieve
this. This means that where functional
union and collective bargaining
systems exist, we will continue to
help strengthen them. Where this is
not the case, we will work with our
strategic suppliers to develop factorybased
worker representation that is
democratically elected. As part of
this, we have set up dedicated local
projects (s. 2.22, 2.23 and 2.24). By
developing a new supplier assessment
method (s. 2.6), we are currently also
strengthening our data collection so
that we can track the performance
against these goals also in regard
to democratically elected workplace
representation. This is a unique
approach and ambition in our industry
and we hope that it will inspire
others to follow and support our
efforts.