Department store retailer John Lewis has created a corporate social responsibility committee.
The nine-strong committee has been set up to guide the UK company’s CSR programme, which was outlined last month in its first social and environmental report. Led by deputy chairman David Felwick, it has board-level representatives from various operating units.
Committee member Nick Monger-Godfrey said it had been devised ‘to develop corporate policy and strategy, and to establish assurance programmes so each operating unit can demonstrate compliance with our policy and principles.’ It would help to ensure a consistent approach across the divisions, the head of environmental management added.
The retailer, whose 27,700 employees are partners in the business and receive a share of the profits each year, says it is looking at ‘how best social and environmental issues can be incorporated into the responsibilities of management at all levels’.
It is also to expand its monitoring of suppliers from the end of this year. Its overseas buying agents last year began assessing factory conditions, employee welfare and environmental impact, as part of an ‘ethical supplier programme’.
This has focused on suppliers in the Far East, with 200 inspections completed and two factories taken off the John Lewis supplier list because they ‘were unwilling to make the necessary recommended improvements’.
Internal reports on the visits are verified by the ten year-old US-based social auditing firm CSCC.
Monger-Godfrey said attention would now turn to other areas of the world, although no decision has yet been made as to where. ‘We felt the Far East was the area where there was greatest risk of standards being below an acceptable level,’ he said. The company has more than 8000 suppliers in 45 countries.
In its unverified 34-page social and environmental report, John Lewis, which has 26 UK stores and owns the Waitrose supermarket chain, reveals it no longer sells Brazilian mahogany products after Greenpeace expressed concerns last year that mahogany furniture sold in one of the stores was from an unsustainable source. When it could not verify the origin of the wood, the company encouraged the supplier to find a different source.
The assets of the partnership, which turned over £2.1billion ($3.3bn) last year, were taken over by a trust in 1928 and it is run as a co-owned partnership with no outside shareholders. Each year, partners share a profits bonus paid as a percentage of annual salary. This year, the figure was nine per cent of salary.
Many decisions at John Lewis, including a recent switch to seven-day trading, are made by a vote of all partners. Staff councils allocate more than half of the £1.5m the company gives to charity.
In 2001, John Lewis employees spent 13,739 hours on secondment to 33 charities.