Social impact involves making a meaningful and lasting difference in society, enhancing individual lives and the health and prosperity of communities more broadly. Our aim is to contribute to the creation of a world where everyone can lead a fulfilling life, where communities thrive, and where the planet is sustained for future generations.
Making a difference starts with the fundamentals: making sure that human rights are respected throughout our own operations and within our broader supply chains.
Human rights
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Across our activities and those of our supply chain we are committed to the highest international standards in human rights. This commitment is documented in our Human Rights policy and underpinned by our Code of Business Ethics. We also have position papers on Modern Slavery and Conflict Minerals.
Our Human Rights policy is based on international human rights standards such as the International Bill of Human Rights and the Declaration on the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
We are committed to respecting human rights in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. As a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), we promote decent work throughout our operations and in our global supply chains.
We believe the subject of human rights is one that should be embedded across all our business practices and processes. Everyone must understand how, and why, human rights matter in their day-to-day jobs. The topic of human rights is also a key focus area when working with suppliers. Via our Supplier Code and our Responsible Sourcing standard, we extend our human rights policies to suppliers and partners by requiring them to adhere to similar ethical practices. For more information on our responsible sourcing practices and our supply chain due diligence approach, see Stakeholder engagement.
Throughout 2024, we took a range actions to advance the embedding of human rights in our internal practices.
In February, we launched our dsm-firmenich Human Rights policy. This policy serves as a guiding framework, outlining how we expect our employees, suppliers, and business partners to work with us on ensuring that human rights are respected. Reference to this policy is also made in our Code of Business Ethics training.
In June, we published our first Human Rights report. In this report, we highlight how we conduct due diligence, share our story on reported cases of human rights infringements, and highlight an existing supply chain remediation case, to demonstrate how we apply our commitment to respect the highest human rights standards. From 2025 onwards, we will publish our annual Human Rights report together with our Integrated Annual Report.
We also assessed the degree to which salient human rights issues are being followed up in all our sites in accordance with the definitions and standards of the ILO. This assessment examined whether human rights are integrated into our company’s policies, procedures, and decision-making processes across all business functions.
This internal analysis resulted in various actions, such as extending our grievance mechanism to our supply chain, the launch of a pilot project on working hours, the extension of our living-wage commitment to suppliers, and an action to further develop the freedom of association within our operations. Following external validation, these actions will be converted into our overall company Human Rights action plan.
Our human rights performance is being assessed externally by SMETA audits. This is an ethical audit methodology serviced on the SEDEX platform, that encompasses all aspects of responsible business practice.
To hold ourselves accountable for our performance on human rights, we have set ourselves the ambition for the human rights pillar in our SMETA audits to achieve zero critical non-conformity cases by the end of 2025. Our progress will be communicated in our Human Rights report.
To create awareness of our human rights efforts, we celebrated International Human Rights Day with a video message via our internal news site. Tailor-made human rights learning sessions will be scheduled for 2025. We value the voices of all rights holders. To continue improving our own skills in conducting meaningful stakeholder dialogue, we will join the Community of Practice of the Dutch Social and Economic Council (Sociaal-economische Raad (SER)).
Equitable living standards
We care for our employees and their families by providing them a decent standard of living by paying a living wage. Living wage is the remuneration received for a standard working week (the relevant legal regular working hours or 48 hours per week, whichever is lower) by a worker in a particular place sufficient to afford a decent standard of living for the worker and her or his family. This includes proper access to health, food and nutrition, housing, and education. Every two years, we assess our living wage commitment using the benchmark data of WageIndicator.
With sustainability at the core of everything we do, we build resilience for long-term success, not only for ourselves but for everyone connected to our business. As a next step, we want to secure the same for more people beyond our workforce. We will work with our suppliers, other businesses, governments, and NGOs to create change and encourage the global adoption of living wage practices. This is also why we have subscribed to the two living wage targets of UNGC. We are also a member of the EcoVadis Living wage learning group.