CSR

[ISO 26000 Core Subject] Human Rights and Labour Practices

The Fujikura Group is committed to identifying the needs of customers, employees, and society to build win-win relationships with them and to incorporating the results into personnel methods and systems.

In the Fujikura Group CSR Activity Guidelines, the Group sets the following rule on human rights:
14) Respect the human rights of all people and refuse to tolerate the violation of human rights such as forced labor and child labor.

For all its employees around the world, the Fujikura Group manages occupational safety and health ethically and ensures a good working environment, where human rights are respected and discrimination is prohibited, based on Fujikura's Code of Conduct. We are also committed to fair and square labor management in line with the International Labour Conventions that set out international labor standards, while also giving due consideration to the related laws, regulations, and social norms, including the Japanese Labor Standards Act and the Industrial Safety and Health Act.

We are committed to building relationships of trust between labor and management through discussions conducted with mutual respect by both parties. In order to keep labor union members fully informed, we also hold briefing sessions and consultation meetings on management policies, business plans, management measures, and business measures. In addition, management and union members engage in frank exchanges of opinions, striving to deepen mutual understanding and resolve any issues or disputes when they arise.
We also hold regular labor-management workshops inviting union leaders, the President, and divisional managers as lecturers to speak about the management environment of the Company, corporate policies, and the labor union's policies. Labor conditions are also determined through labor-management discussions and agreements reached at consultation meetings.

Recently human rights have been attracting much attention as a theme of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Human rights entail a range of issues, including racism, child labor, forced labor, overwork, death from overwork, mental health, utilization of women's abilities, problems related to people with disabilities, treatment of foreigners and LGBT (sexual minorities), sexual harassment, power abuse, and so-called "maternity harassment." Topics concerning human rights are covered by mass media almost every day.

Starting its CSR activities from 2009, the Fujikura Group has been attributing importance to becoming a corporate group that is friendly to both people and the global environment, and has been widely communicating this message. "Friendly to people" implies our strong commitment to respecting and protecting the human rights of all stakeholders.

We conduct human rights-related activities in line with the approach to human rights that has been taken by the United Nations since its founding, and specifically with the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Fujikura Ltd. announced its support for the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), which sets out the universal and international principles on human rights, labor, the environment and anti-corruption. On September 3, 2013, the company became a signatory to the Global Compact and also joined the Global Compact Japan Network (GC-JN).

We support the Ten Principles, and in particular the principles on human rights. Human rights represent one of the most important universal concepts, with all people required to be afforded equal human rights. The concept was originated from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which is widely recognized as the basis for international laws.

As one of its CSR campaign activities, the Fujikura Group implemented the Human Rights Day campaign on December 10 in 2014 as well. In this campaign, we put up posters at Group bases for Human Rights Day on December 10, and introduced the background to the announcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the establishment of Human Rights Day by the United Nations on the intranet. The campaign thus provided employees with a good opportunity to think about human rights.

Fujikura Ltd. has been implementing measures for the Ten Principles since it joined the Global Compact in September 2013, and conducting a range of CSR activities based on the Ten Principles while paying attention to the international framework-building activities conducted by the United Nations. The following shows the human rights-related declarations, principles, and others that the United Nations has been fostering with regard to companies.

As a conference indirectly related to human rights, the United Nations also holds the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction with an eye to minimizing damage to people's life, property and daily living caused by disasters, including natural disasters, by enhancing international cooperation.

The Fujikura Group conducts CSR activities and creates the Fujikura Group CSR Integrated Report to introduce its activities to stakeholders based on the ISO 26000 international standard on social responsibility. ISO 26000 states the definition of human rights as well as the comprehensive approach to be taken and process to be followed by companies with regard to human rights (practice of "human rights due diligence"). The Fujikura Group will foster human rights-related measures in consideration of the ISO 26000 concept of human rights due diligence.

According to ISO 26000, human rights are the fundamental rights given to all people and include the right to liberty and life, equality under the law, freedom of expression, the right to work, and rights to food, health, education and social security. As for the scope of responsibility for human rights, ISO 26000 provides that organizations (companies) should respect human rights within the scope of their influence.

Companies have been conducting human rights-related activities at individual departments in line with ISO 26000, but they are now required to implement more cross-organizational initiatives to solve human rights-related problems, in particular, comprehensive measures to identify the negative influence of corporate activities, which mean to exercise "human rights due diligence."

The Fujikura Group conducts the following human rights-related activities for each category of its stakeholders.

* Activities shown in parentheses indirectly contribute to the protection of human rights.

The Fujikura Group has been globally fostering CSR-oriented procurement based on the Fujikura Group Basic Procurement Policy. In order to respect human rights in the procurement of materials, we ask suppliers to comply with the nine human rights-related rules in our CSR-Related Requests to Suppliers.

We also regularly conduct a supply chain management questionnaire survey targeting major suppliers. The questionnaire includes a range of CSR-related questions, such as those on consideration of human rights. The answers are evaluated by Fujikura Ltd. and the evaluation results are fed back to the suppliers to foster information-sharing between the Fujikura Group and each supplier.

The Fujikura Group CSR Committee has been examining measures to deal with the issue of conflict minerals (gold, tin, tantalum and tungsten: 3TG), which are minerals extracted through child labor, forced labor and other inhumane acts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and surrounding countries and regions taking advantage of local conflicts that started in the 1990s. In July 2010, following the enactment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in the United States, the CSR Committee decided to conduct a supply chain survey on the use of conflict minerals, and subsequently in August 2011 established and announced the Fujikura Group Conflict Minerals Policy.

The following indicates the measures implemented by the Fujikura Group with regard to conflict minerals:

Fujikura Automotive (Thailand) Ltd. (FATL) provided scholarships to 17 students from Bueng Thap Chang School in Thailand to support their education.

Fujikura Ltd. provides employees with an internal whistle-blowing system and an external consulting service offered by a third party to prevent compliance- and human rights-related problems and present more reporting options to employees.