Social Responsibility – Gueldenpfennig

We take social responsibility seriously and are constantly working to make our supply chains fair and socially responsible. As this involves providing good working and living conditions for a large number of people, we dedicate a great deal of effort to this undertaking.

Our international Social Compliance team has a wide range of complex tasks and faces many different experiences and challenges. On this page, we will take a look at our work and our efforts to uphold human rights and labour rights.

If we are to live up to our social responsibilities, it is crucial that we are actively involved at the production sites and that we participate in industry initiatives. That is why we put together a team of experts based in Bangladesh, China and Germany specialising in social standards as early as 2006. Since then, we have greatly reduced the number of approved factories in our supplier pool and expanded our audits to include comprehensive transparency requirements.

The team has grown considerably over the years because this work is so essential. In 2013 the team was also joined by a task force that focuses entirely on supply chain transparency and conducts solely unannounced audits. Every year we carry out several hundred (un)announced factory audits with different areas of focus at the facilities of our various partner companies. We monitor and support their compliance with and improvement of various internal and external standards regarding factory safety and labour standards.

Code of Conduct

&

Policies

Ethical business conduct and protection of our customers, end customers and all those involved in production operations along the supply chain are of special importance to us. We impose a range of requirements on our business partners to ensure these principles are upheld.

The amfori BSCI Code of Conduct forms the core of our requirements as an overarching set of values. This Code of Conduct defines principles and values that we stand for as a company and with which our business partners must also comply. It is guided by international conventions, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Code of Conduct is supplemented by various policies that require, for example, the observance of human rights, the protection of workers and transparency on the part of our business partners.
Our Social Compliance Requirement Manual lists all the minimum social requirements that we demand from our manufacturers.

Güldenpfennig Audit System

“We constantly communicate with the factories to ensure and continuously improve good working conditions. We support the factories in these measures to help them reach the standard necessary to be accepted into our pool of producers.
Our most essential task is to convey to the factories that we work together as partners.
Our key to success is to build trust and communicate the importance of transparency to the factories because this is the basis of solid cooperation.”

amfori BSCI Code of Conduct

aamfori BSCI Codeaof Conduct

We joined the amfori Business Social Compliance Initiative (amfori BSCI) as early as 2008 to ensure that our requirements for social standards and labour standards were being adhered to and continuously improved upon in our business partners’ factories.

It is a core value of the amfori BSCI system that there must be continuous improvement of the human rights and labour rights standards of its members and the companies in the supply chains. For this reason, our garment factories have signed the amfori BSCI Code of Conduct, committing themselves to comply with it. Their performance in implementing the Code of Conduct is regularly reviewed through internal audits and verified by independent, external audit companies.

Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety

Bangladesh Accordaon Fire aand Building Safety

The Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety (or simply “the Accord”) was established in 2013 after the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Dhaka (Bangladesh).
This devastating accident killed more than 1,100 people and injured countless others. It tragically highlighted the deficiencies of building safety standards in Bangladesh.
The Accord’s successfully reviewed and upgraded standards for fire and building safety have been in place to prevent such disasters for many years now. The implementation of necessary safety measures is important to Güldenpfennig so that we also signed the Accord follow-up agreements in 2018 and 2021. These follow-up agreements are intended to enable the country to once again take independent responsibility for safe workplaces in the garment industry. Since June 2021, this responsibility has been gradually transferred to a Bangladeshi supervisory authority, the RMG Sustainability Council (RSC).