The government has thrown its support behind the first wide-scale project to rank companies on their human rights performance.
The innovative project, announced by International group Aviva Investors at the end of 2014, has also been welcomed by the British Occupational Hygiene Society (BOHS).
The new corporate human rights benchmark will assess and rank the human rights performance of international companies. A total of 500 of the top global companies from four key sectors – agriculture, ICT, Apparel and Extractives – will initially be researched and ranked.
It is hoped that the development will harness the competitive nature of global markets to drive better human rights performance, through developing a transparent, publicly available and credible benchmark.
Jo Swinson, the Business Minister, confirmed the UK government would financially back the project, including £80,000 in start-up funding.
“Worker health protection is an international human rights issue and the statistics prove that this new project is greatly needed,” said Mike Slater, BOHS president.
“Every 15 seconds, a worker somewhere in the world dies from a work-related accident or disease. This means that every day, more than 6,000 people die due to occupational accidents or work-related diseases.”
BOHS has urged British employers to look at worker health and safety in assessing their international supply chains.
In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
