2020 Sustainability Report

Why Human Rights & Fair Labor Practices Matters

As a manufacturing company, Greif participates in a labor-intensive industry. Our commitment to upholding international human rights and fair labor practices is directly aligned with our commitments to the health, safety and wellbeing of our colleagues. We maintain these standards and expectations throughout our supply chain. We are committed to working with responsible supply partners to ensure our customers’ confidence in our responsible sourcing and labor practices.

Governance

Greif maintains human rights and fair labor practices in accordance with the UN Global Compact Principles and International Labor Organization’s Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. We enforce various policies to manage our commitment to these Principles internally and in our supply chain. This includes our Anti-harassment, Child Labor, Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity, Fair Treatment of Others, Human Rights and Supplier Code of Conduct policies. Greif’s local HR teams leverage risk assessments, age and legal working status verifications, awareness training, localized gender equality procedures and whistleblower procedures to implement these policies in our operations. To enable our colleagues to anonymously report potential human rights violations, we publicly post our global Ethics Line in all facilities. Each complaint is instantly directed to a regional vice president or director so it can be addressed appropriately. We investigated and resolved 97 percent of complaints in 2020. The remaining complaints are under ongoing investigation.

42.4 percent of Greif’s colleagues engage in collective bargaining agreements (CBA). Each CBA is independently managed in each region with our Human Resources and Legal teams providing oversight. For further information on Greif’s approach to labor relations, please see Risk Management & Business Continuity.

Our Human Rights and Labor Practices team is led by EMEA’s Regional Human Resources Director with support from members of the global human resources community representing each region and business unit. In 2020, we piloted a human rights audit across 48 Greif sites in 23 countries and constructed a risk matrix based on regional profiles, facility performance and other risk factors to prioritize higher-risk facilities. From this pilot, we intend to create a pragmatic, consistent program to identify human rights and labor risks in all our facilities, identify mitigating actions and implement best-practice actions and solutions in line with our commitments to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, UN Global Compact, ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights frameworks. Based on the learnings from our pilot we will finalize and embed the Human Rights Review process into our operations as an ongoing mechanism to ensure we are consistently auditing and improving our human rights and labor practices.

Goals & Progress

Our Human Rights & Fair Labor Practice goals are:

• 100 percent of our operations will be subject to internal human rights reviews, measured on a rolling cycle, by the end of fiscal year 2025.
• 100 percent of colleagues will be trained in human rights policies and procedures by the end of fiscal year 2025.

In 2020, we began our Human Rights Reviews conducting pilot audits at 48 facilities, 21 percent of our production sites. As we finalize this program, we will continue to conduct the audits at our facilities on a rolling basis. As Greif University is launched, we will leverage this platform to better promote and distribute training on human rights policies and procedures. In 2021, we will review our goals and determine new 2030 goals.