Electrical retailer Dixons has been criticized by a group of UK local authority pension funds for failing to disclose its policies on ethical supply chain management.
The Local Authority Pension Fund Forum, whose 25 members manage assets of over £40billion ($62bn), says Dixons is being unnecessarily secretive over the nature of its supply chain management.
It says the company has assured the forum it has a supply chain policy which is being rolled out to suppliers, but has yet to publish the policy or to set targets for implementation.
‘A further problem is that the policy covers only own brand suppliers, which account for 20 per cent of Dixons’ sales,’ it says.
Forum representatives at Dixon’s recent annual meeting sought commitments on whether the company would extend the policy to cover branded goods and start reporting within a year, but came away disappointed. ‘The response at the AGM from outgoing chairman Sir Stanley Kalms was not encouraging,’ it said.
The forum recently changed the emphasis of its labour standards campaign from persuading retailers to adopt ethical supply chain management policies, to looking at how those policies are implemented.
It started engaging on labour standards three years ago by asking listed retail companies whether they had policies on child labour, minimum wages, freedom of association and other social issues (EP3, issue 9).
Dixons said: ‘We will do all that we can to audit the workplace standards of our suppliers of directly-sourced products.’ It claimed to have made ‘significant progress’ with other audits in line with the SA8000 standard.