Hewlett-Packard: Supporting Human Rights Advocacies
Over the years, companies and business organizations have continuously developed their goals and principles to accommodate various practices that value employees’ human rights. A number of companies have even come up with standards and laws that help intensify their human rights programs.
Hewlett-Packard (HP), one of the world’s largest technology-based services company, is one of the companies committed in the practice of instilling respect for its employees’ human rights. The company has a running belief that every person, or every employee, is entitled to the highest standards of treatment whether he is inside or out of the office. Thus, the company came up with the Supply Chain Code of Conduct which further affirms HP’s support for the protection of international human rights.
Through this code, HP ensures its consumers, stockholders, and stakeholders, that the company does not support forced, bonded, or involuntary labor. All of the company’s employment terms are voluntary. In relation to this, HP does not support and practice child labor and has even set age laws and requirements for all its employees.
Some of the other human right concerns covered by HP’s code of conduct include complying with the set number of working hours and overtime pay requirements; setting employee wages to the legally required minimum; and prohibiting discrimination of any kind as well as abhorring physical abuse and all forms of harassment. HP’s workers are also given the freedom to participate in and organize trade unions.
Like most multinational companies, HP has embraced the promotion of equal human rights as one of its prime responsibilities. Judging from the way the company has continuously stayed ahead of most of its competitors, HP seems to be doing a good job.
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