Human rights

Performance

Recognising and respecting human rights

We aim to attract, develop and retain high-calibre people with the skills, attributes and drive to help SABMiller achieve its strategic objectives, both now and in the future.  We seek to treat all our employees and contractors fairly and with respect and to provide a safe working environment. 

Our employees are compensated with a fair wage and comprehensive benefits, and have access to development opportunities both within their role and towards career progression.

This year we engaged expert advisers to review our human rights policies, procedures and performance measurement in the light of Professor John Ruggie's final report to the UN on Business and Human Rights. The feedback was that SABMiller in general is ahead of many businesses in this respect, particularly in our independent assessments of human rights issues across the value chain - an example being the Oxfam poverty footprint report (PDF 0.60Mb). However, there is more we can do, such as improving our verification of supplier performance. To this end, our global procurement company, Trinity, has joined SEDEX, a not-for-profit organisation promoting ethical and responsible business practices in global supply chains.

We respect our employees' right to union representation and 36.4% of our workforce belongs to a union. Many of our businesses have developed productive partnerships with trade unions on collective bargaining and other issues.

In South Africa, we actively support Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) as a way of addressing the systemic inequalities of the past and we strive to achieve the highest levels of compliance. This year we continued our improving trend with a rating of 72.89 out of a possible 100 in our BBBEE audit (2011: 70.81). Through the BBBEE ownership programme, SAB Zenzele, we have created almost 40,000 shareholders among our staff and our retailers. Retailers who acquired the minimum allocation of shares for R100 at the start of the programme in 2010 have, to date, received R875 in dividends, almost nine times their initial investment.