Understanding and managing our human rights risks

We are continuing our journey to better understand the human rights risks associated with our activities, and to establish the tools and processes to manage these risks. Our goal is to minimize any risk of our operations causing harm to people.

Read about our progress in our Promise Always act ethically and respect human rights.

Our commitment

Human rights are at the core of our Code of Conduct and our Promise Always act ethically and respect human rights, which is part of our For the Better sustainability framework. As our most important risk areas relate to our employees, and particularly those in our manufacturing operations, our human rights commitment focuses on labor standards and the rights of our employees.

Our Code of Conduct includes a human rights policy statement, developed based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. It considers the outcomes of our human rights impact assessments as well as best practice in the field.

Human rights governance and responsibilities

Line managers, from Group management and down, are responsible for ensuring adherence with Group policies on human rights as part of our human rights governance structure.

Our Ethics & Human Rights Steering Group oversees both ethics and human rights and is responsible for evaluating our human rights approach, including approving priorities and action plans. It consists of senior managers and Group management members, including the General Counsel SVP, SVP Human Resources & Organizational Development, SVP Internal Audit, SVP Corporate Communications, and VP Sustainability Affairs. A Human Rights Coordination Group is responsible for identifying and assessing risks, and developing human rights action plans.

Identifying human rights risks

We have developed a methodology to identify and assess human rights impacts on a Group level. The methodology is in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and common practices for human rights impact assessments.

The methodology includes interviews, surveys and workshops, and was originally applied to identify our salient human rights risks in 2016. This encompassed surveys and interviews with around 40 representatives from all business areas, regions and key functions within the Group. It also incorporated input from employee representatives, investors and NGOs.

The continued work to assess human rights risks focuses on operations in high-risk countries from a human rights, labor rights and corruption perspective, and the methodology has been used as part of human rights assessments in Egypt, Thailand and Ukraine in recent years. A local assessment of our manufacturing operations in Romania was initiated in 2019.

Read more in our Promise Always act ethically and respect human rights.

Statement on our salient human rights issues

The Group level assessment helped to establish which are our salient human rights issues, listed below. Electrolux has defined improvement areas for each salient human rights issue, with responsibilities allocated to relevant senior managers, and our progress is monitored by the Ethics & Human Rights Steering Group.

The relevant local managers have the responsibility for implementing actions to remediate the prioritized issues resulting from local assessments. The status and next steps for each human rights issue are also described below.

Our 2019 Materiality Analysis reconfirmed our salient human rights issues as stated below, with the exception of sexual exploitation, which has been removed from the list. The original inclusion of sexual exploitation in the list of salient issues, reflected the fact that the Group did not have a clearly communicated policy statement banning employees from purchasing sexual services or visit strip clubs, in conjunction with business trips or as part of representing the company with suppliers or customers. This gap has been rectified as part of our work in 2018 to update our Group Policies and launch the Electrolux Code of Conduct.

Human rights issues and context

Additional important potential impacts on human rights are related to health and safety in our operations and product safety. However, these are deemed to be well-managed by existing programs and are therefore not included in our salient human rights. See our Promise Ensure the best health and safety to read more about how we work with health and safety.

High-risk locations

We map our operations using the Verisk Maplecroft Human Rights and Corruption Risk Atlas. Historic audit results and industry risks also feed into our overall risk mapping. This forms the basis for our audit programs, the prioritization of countries for local human rights risk assessments, and also risk screening for acquisitions, market entry and new partners.

Read more in our Promise Always act ethically and respect human rights.

Please see the list of our high-risk countries here.

Stakeholder engagement

Our approach to assessing local human rights impacts includes interviewing employees, employee representatives and experts on human rights, labor rights and corruption – including advocacy groups, local representatives of international organizations, academia and embassies. The context these external stakeholders provide is essential for understanding expectations on us as a responsible company and employer, as well as assessing potential human rights risks. This includes information regarding the protection of human rights in the country in question, the situation for labor organizations, and other information regarding specific human rights that are at risk.

Read more about our stakeholders.

Human rights in acquisitions

'Acquisitions' is one of the salient human rights issues identified at Group level, where human rights could be better embedded. We have a guideline in place for human rights and corruption screening to help systemize how these risks are incorporated into the due diligence effort, the business deal and also considered in the future integration of the company with Electrolux. EHS and labor standards are also part of acquisition projects.

Work is underway to establish a structured procedure for how all sustainability related processes and system are part of the integration of newly acquired companies, and this includes ethics and human rights.

Implementation, monitoring and follow up

Employee education in our human rights principles takes place through training and communication activities. Following the restructuring of our Group policies and the launch of our revised Code of Conduct, we launched new and updated e-learning modules and communication campaigns. We currently monitor our human rights performance through internal and external audits, our Ethics Helpline, employee-management dialogue, health and safety committees, and the Code of Conduct mailbox for suppliers.

These approaches are complemented by local human rights impact assessments, which provide further details about the risk of negative impact on people by focusing on our activities at country level.