Impact on developing markets continued
Employee rights
Our employees are entitled to the rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous conventions from the International Labour Organisation. In many countries these rights are further elaborated in local legislation and are, if necessary, enforced by government.
In some countries, government fails to implement the core ILO conventions or are not consistent in their implementation. Consequently, in the absence of a clear and reliable legal framework, companies must define their own modus operandi. This is also true for Heineken in some locations.
In 2006, research undertaken by the Dutch trade union FNV Mondiaal was finalised. In March 2007, a number of reports focusing on the behaviour of Dutch multinational enterprises in several countries were presented in an open forum. In our case, research undertaken at our operations located in Croatia, Indonesia and our joint venture in Ghana, demonstrated that we take the rights of, and our obligations to, our employees seriously. At the same time, certain areas for further improvement were highlighted to local management. We have invited FNV Mondiaal to repeat the same research exercise in three years time to assess if progress has been made.
In November 2006, Heineken, along with other Dutch multinational enterprises, was accused by the chairperson of Dutch trade union FNV of actively lobbying against a proposal for reform of the Chinese labour contract law. Investigations into this matter have concluded that a letter had been sent by the European Chamber of Commerce in China on the subject to the Chinese authorities. Heineken Shanghai Trading Corporation, a 100 percent subsidiary of our joint venture Asia Pacific Breweries, is member of this organisation. Neither Heineken, nor Asia Pacific Breweries has had any active involvement with the letter in question. This incident was discussed with FNV in February 2007 and the conclusion reached was that Heineken indeed had no direct responsibility for the letter or any other lobby activities.
We believe that we have a good track record for respecting our employees’ rights. Employee rights are subject to monitoring through an annual survey in which we ask our operating companies to indicate whether incidents have occurred. For 2006, no incidents were reported. Nevertheless, we realise that as a growing and expanding company we need to provide better guidance to our local operations about what we expect from them. For this reason, in 2006 we drafted a document outlining Heineken’s vision on employee rights and also investigated the potential use of self-assessment methodologies. Consequently, we have selected the Human Rights Compliance Assessment (HRCA) tool offered by the Danish Institute for Human Rights as the best option for our company. Due to limited available resources at the time, we had to postpone pilot studies of the Heineken vision and the HRCA in 2006. We will conduct this pilot in the course of 2007 and make our final choices following the evaluation of results.
