Case study: How Equinor promotes human rights across its supply chain
Equinor is an international energy company present in over 30 countries worldwide, with more than 21,000 committed employees developing oil, gas, wind and solar energy. Equinor works systematically to integrate human rights in its normal way of doing business and across its supply chain Tweet This!, committed to respecting internationally recognised human rights of people affected by its operations.
This case study is based on the 2019 Sustainability Report by Equinor published on the Global Reporting Initiative Sustainability Disclosure Database that can be found at this link. Through all case studies we aim to demonstrate what CSR/ ESG/ sustainability reporting done responsibly means. Essentially, it means: a) identifying a company’s most important impacts on the environment, economy and society, and b) measuring, managing and changing.
Abstract
Equinor is committed to making its best efforts so that human rights are respected across the entire Equinor, including its employees, the people affected by its operations and partnerships, as well as throughout its supply chains. In order to promote human rights across its supply chain Equinor took action to:
- assess suppliers
- engage workers and suppliers
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With this case study you will see:
- Which are the most important impacts (material issues) Equinor has identified;
- How Equinor proceeded with stakeholder engagement, and
- What actions were taken by Equinor to promote human rights across its supply chain
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What are the material issues the company has identified?
In its 2019 Sustainability Report Equinor identified a range of material issues, such as business integrity, resource management (waste and water), GHG emissions, diversity and inclusion, emergency preparedness. Among these, promoting human rights across its supply chain stands out as a key material issue for Equinor.
Stakeholder engagement in accordance with the GRI Standards
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) defines the Principle of Stakeholder Inclusiveness when identifying material issues (or a company’s most important impacts) as follows:
Stakeholders must be consulted in the process of identifying a company’s most important impacts and their reasonable expectations and interests must be taken into account. This is an important cornerstone for CSR / sustainability reporting done responsibly.
Key stakeholder groups Equinor engages with:
| Stakeholder Group |
| Employees |
| Shareholders |
| Governments |
| Business partners and suppliers |
| Customers |
| Society at large, including nongovernmental organisations and academia. |
How stakeholder engagement was made to identify material issues
To identify and prioritise material topics Equinor engaged with its stakeholders through regular dialogue, media analysis, investor roadshows and other stakeholder outreach with key stakeholders on sustainability topics.
What actions were taken by Equinor to promote human rights across its supply chain?
In its 2019 Sustainability Report Equinor reports that it took the following actions for promoting human rights across its supply chain:
- Assessing suppliers
- In 2019, Equinor’s Human Rights Expectations to Suppliers were launched and will be supported by a guidance document providing practical advice for how to live up to these expectations. These efforts continued alongside Equinor’s onsite assessments with more than 50 suppliers across 16 countries. The assessments enabled Equinor to identify gaps and areas of improvement in collaboration with its suppliers, to ensure that potential harm to people is reduced or eliminated.
- Engaging workers and suppliers
- During 2019, Equinor piloted a new way of identifying potential negative impacts on workers’ human rights related to supplier conduct, moving from company-focused audits to worker dialogue-focused reviews, enhancing its risk identification abilities and granularity. In 2019, Equinor continued this work and performed renewed engagement with workers to help it understand if the implemented actions improved their lives. This renewed engagement confirmed that the efforts taken by Equinor’s supplier had resulted in return of passports, tighter control of working hours and a strengthened recruitment due diligence process which significantly reduced worker paid recruitment fees for newly recruited workers compared to 2018. Building on the learnings from this pilot, Equinor initiated another supplier engagement programme following the same approach. Here, Equinor saw positive outcomes for workers through the discontinued practice of retention of worker ID documents, improved conditions in accommodation and sanitation areas, and discontinued fees for work mistakes. The positive steps from these two cases would not have been possible without the close collaboration with direct suppliers, who also updated their own internal procedures and allocated staff to develop their own practice in this area. This was supplemented by the adoption of the “Employer Pays” principle for all new direct and indirect hires from 01 January 2020 by this supplier, as well as through ongoing due diligence of manning agencies in source countries, where this principle will be updated into agency agreements. Following the agreement of peer collaboration on human rights supplier assessments in 2018, a platform for sharing and viewing of assessments was developed and was launched in 2020. This industry-first initiative will drive collaboration in the follow up process towards energy company suppliers.
Which GRI Standards and corresponding Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been addressed?
The GRI Standard addressed in this case is: Disclosure 414-1 New suppliers that were screened using social criteria
Disclosure 414-1 New suppliers that were screened using social criteria corresponds to:
- Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5: Gender Equality
- Targets: 5.2
- Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth
- Targets: 8.8
- Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
- Targets: 16.1
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References:
1) This case study is based on published information by Equinor, located at the link below. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses. However, we made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the report’s meaning. If you would like to quote these written sources from the original, please revert to the original on the Global Reporting Initiative’s Sustainability Disclosure Database at the link:
http://database.globalreporting.org/
2) https://www.globalreporting.org/standards/gri-standards-download-center/
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