Ethical trading

Progress 2007 cont...

Assisting improvement

We have invested heavily in building the labour standards capabilities of our suppliers and our own commercial teams in 2007. All Tesco buyers must attend a half-day course to understand better the impact of their purchasing decisions on labour standards and to help them identify potential issues. Technical managers (responsible for standards and compliance within the commercial teams) attend a more intensive two-day course to ensure they can support buyers in managing these issues effectively. In 2007 we trained over 650 buyers and technical managers.

High-risk suppliers to our UK business attend our 'Supplying With Your Eyes Open' workshop to understand our requirements of them and help ensure good labour standards at their factories. In 2007 we ran 11 workshops in Hong Kong, China, Poland, Thailand, Bangladesh, Turkey and India, which were attended by 534 supplier representatives from both food and non-food sectors. These were delivered by consultants in the local language with a Tesco representative present. We are in the process of rolling out our supplier training programme to all our international businesses.

Where problems are particularly complex or systemic, we consider a further range of actions to help suppliers address them. This can involve visits by Tesco staff or independent auditors to the factory or farm to agree improvement programmes, or running extra training courses for a number of suppliers experiencing similar difficulties. For example in China, where long working hours are a common problem, we have provided training for factory supervisors to focus on effective production scheduling to minimise the need for long working hours and temporary labour.