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CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa » Corporate social responsibility extends company borders
Corporate social responsibility extends company borders
Corporations have a clear responsibility for the operations and business practices along their supply chain. Over the past few years, there is increasing pressure to take this responsibility very seriously. If sub-standard working conditions are observed at a supplier’s factory, non governmental organizations (NGOs) turn to corporations and pressure them to improve their supplier’s activities and support the improvements.

At HP, we regard it as our responsibility to ensure that our suppliers engage in socially accepted operations and business practices. When we introduced a code of conduct for our suppliers in 2003, we were the first IT company to do so. Ever since, we have conducted supplier audits and helped our suppliers to comply with our code. Furthermore, our own suppliers are required to ensure that their suppliers act according to our code of conduct and operate in a socially acceptable manner.

We are conscious and sensitive to the rising demands made on our suppliers. We see that we are in a strong position to influence our suppliers and ensure that our materials and products are produced under environmentally sound and ethically conditions.

Being aware of our influence, we led the development of the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC) in 2004 together with Dell, IBM and our leading suppliers to foster responsible labor, human rights, health and safety, environmental, and ethics practices across the electronic industry’s global supply chain.

We believe that it is important that everyone in society – be it an individual or a corporation – should contribute according to his or her possibilities. Global corporations are sometimes in a much better position to foster ethical principles or address social problems.

We acknowledge that and do our part. But we also face certain boundaries and that is why we often cooperate with partners – be it business partners or NGOs. We cooperate for example with The Copenhagen Centre for Corporate Responsibility and work on an initiative to equip small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the management tools needed to operate their businesses in a socially and environmentally sustainable manner. Our experiences have shown us that we can achieve more in a partnership and that is why we continue to work closely together with other institutions to address societal issues.

Although we have a strong supplier code of conduct and the EICC in place, now and then we discover ethical issues in our supply chain. In these cases we react immediately and support our suppliers in improving their operations and activities as to conform to our standards. Unfortunately, even for industry leaders like us it is not yet possible to control and influence all operations and aspects along the supply chain. We are aware of that and are continuously working on improving situations based on the audit results of our suppliers.

Realizing that corporate responsibility expands well beyond corporate boundaries is a first step and we hope we are on the right track to being a good corporate citizen.

Karl Daumueller, Program Manager, HP Global Procurement Services
Posted 02-26-2007 6:57 PM by BlogArchive
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