Human Rights
Treating people with dignity and respect and operating ethically are core values at Hasbro. Creating joy and building community for all people around the world requires steadfast adherence to the highest principles of fairness, respect and ethics.
Human Rights
At Hasbro, we believe all people are entitled to fundamental rights and freedoms. We regard safety, well-being and dignity — of our employees, the workers in our supply chain and children everywhere — as deeply held obligations.
Working with partners and suppliers around the world on human rights and ethical sourcing issues is complex, but we remain vigilant in our commitment to ensure everyone in our supply chain is treated in accordance with the law and our rigorous ethical requirements. Specifically, we work with our third-party factories, licensees and stakeholders to address social compliance and help ensure our products are manufactured in working conditions that are fair, safe and legal for workers and that support local communities.
Our Human Rights Policy
We assessed and mapped human rights risks and opportunities across our company, which ultimately led us to focus on three primary constituencies: employees, supply chain workers and children. Each of these groups is essential to Hasbro’s success and we developed specific actions to meet their needs.
- EMPLOYEES We implement our human rights commitment through our Guide to Corporate Conduct, our human resources policies and our Environment, Health and Safety Policy. This commitment includes ensuring that employment decisions are based on merit, qualifications and abilities, employees are compensated fairly and that we foster a culture of inclusion to support a diverse workforce.
- SUPPLY CHAIN WORKERS Supply chain partners are required to comply with Hasbro’s Global Business Ethics Principles (HGBEP) and undergo annual, unannounced and comprehensive audits. These audits are scored through a Factory Rating system that ties a factory’s ethical sourcing performance to business incentives and consequences. Hasbro prohibits all forms of forced labor, including human trafficking and modern slavery, as detailed in our Global Modern Slavery Statement. Our beyond-compliance worker-well being program provides women with the opportunity to gain skills and confidence helping them to advance in society.
- CHILDREN We believe that the well-being of children globally is inextricably linked to the success of our company. Our commitment to respecting the human rights of children is implemented through our deep and long-standing commitment to Product Safety, Community investments and our Conflict Minerals program.
We ensure that Hasbro employees and workers have channels to report and address human rights concerns. Our global ethics helpline and confidential mailboxes allow employees to report issues anonymously, confidentially and without fear of retaliation. Allegations of inappropriate conduct can also be reported directly to management or to members of our Legal and Human Resources departments. Our helpline and mailboxes are monitored and reviewed by our Legal department. To the extent necessary, follow-up investigations are conducted by experienced personnel from our Legal, Human Resources and Internal Audit teams. For supply chain workers, we maintain a global worker hotline translated into the languages commonly understood by workers. Factories are required to post the hotline information in easily visible areas, such as canteens, dormitories and bathrooms. The hotline is a confidential resource for worker grievances related to the Hasbro Global Business Ethics Principles.
Ethical Sourcing
At Hasbro, we believe all people are entitled to fundamental rights and freedoms. We regard safety, well-being and dignity — of our employees, the workers in our supply chain and children everywhere — as deeply held obligations. Hasbro has a long-standing history and commitment to ethical sourcing. We were one of the first companies in the consumer products industry to implement ethics and safety principles for our owned and operated and third-party factories as early as the 1990s. Since then, we have evolved our industry-leading program to maintain alignment with the ever-changing global human rights landscape.
Working with partners around the world on human rights and ethical sourcing issues is complex. We remain vigilant in our commitment to ensure those in our supply chain are treated in accordance with the law and our rigorous ethical requirements outlined in HGBEP. Specifically, we work with our third-party factories and licensees to address social compliance and help ensure our products are manufactured in working conditions that are fair, safe and legal for workers and that support local communities. We support compliance with HGBEP through ethical sourcing audits, factory ratings, and capacity building. All factories involved in the production of Hasbro products or licensed products must contractually agree to comply with our HGBEP, which seeks to uphold and protect human rights through:
Protecting: working hours and compensation, health and safety, environmental impact, freedom of association and collective bargaining;
Prohibiting: forced labor, child labor, abuse and discrimination and acceptance of advantages
Managing Ethical Sourcing in Our Supply Chain
Ensuring social compliance in our supply chain around the world is a continuous process that requires careful monitoring. At Hasbro, our process for ensuring compliance within our factory base includes prequalification, monitoring, oversight, transparency, capacity building, and partnerships.
In 2019, Hasbro launched its Ethical Sourcing Factory Rating System. This tool organizes, tracks and categorizes factory performance in a simple, color-coded snapshot format. The tool helps our vendors understand and track their performance and is tied to follow-up audit timelines. It also strengthens Hasbro’s overall vendor scorecards by integrating social compliance as a key performance indicator.
Please see below for our annual Top 10 Critical Audit Findings and Corrective Action rate.
Our Ethical Sourcing program is designed to support our current and expanding sourcing model. We engage directly with Hasbro third-party vendors and licensees to drive social and environmental compliance and require them to do the same within their supply chains, including auditing and monitoring of subcontractors.
As strong as principles may be on paper, shared ownership of principles is the key to sustained, long-term success. Our goal is to empower factory management to take ownership of compliance. To that end, we require ongoing, comprehensive training for our suppliers. 100% of our third-party factory management must complete the Hasbro Ethical Sourcing Academy. The Academy is a 30-hour, e-learning social compliance course that trains and reinforces Hasbro’s rigorous ethical sourcing requirements. This mandatory online training is coupled with Hasbro-led in-person vendor workshops hosted in our sourcing office locations around the world. We also provide in-person education and training for Hasbro team members who work closely with our suppliers, including our local sourcing, quality assurance and global security teams.
For a full list of Hasbro vendors and third-party factories, see our 2022 list.
Partnering with Responsible Business Alliance
In 2016, Hasbro expanded its ethical sourcing commitment and collaborations beyond our industry and became the first toy and game company to join the Responsible Business Alliance. Responsible Business Alliance (RBA) is a nonprofit group of leading companies from the retail, automobile, electronics, and other sectors working together to improve efficiency and social, ethical and environmental performance in the global supply chain. We embed the RBA supplier code of conduct (updated every three years) into the Hasbro social compliance program. We require that all suppliers communicate the HGBEP and the RBA Code of Conduct to their respective supply chains, including component and raw material suppliers, to ensure compliance extends throughout the supply chain. The RBA offers best-in-class social compliance tools, such as an e-learning platform and factory worker feedback mechanisms, which we also leverage.
Conflict Minerals
Ethical sourcing includes efforts to ensure that specific minerals (tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold, or “3TG”) come from conflict-free sources, as profits from mining these minerals in certain locations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and in designated surrounding countries (the “Covered Countries”) are used to finance the ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis in that region.
Few 3TGs are used in our products, but whenever they are used, our program ensures they are sourced from conflict-free sources. Since launching our conflict minerals program in 2013, we have continuously improved performance year-over-year. Details regarding our performance can be found in our Conflict Minerals Reports.
Highlights from 2022 include an improved vendor engagement process to address vendor survey responses inconsistent with our 3TG assessment. In 2022, we expanded the scope of our program beyond compliance with 3TG and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to include cobalt. While Hasbro’s use is limited, two primary reasons for including cobalt are: (1) child labor has been identified as a risk in the cobalt mining process; and (2) to expand our mineral due diligence beyond legal requirements. We continue to learn and adopt best practices for conflict-free sourcing, while at the same time, ensuring economic and social development in the conflict regions.
Each year, Hasbro files a conflict minerals disclosure form as required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and conducts a Reasonable Country of Origin Inquiry (RCOI) to determine if necessary 3TG minerals were sourced from the Covered Countries. Contract manufacturers of products believed to contain 3TG were surveyed about the source of these minerals. The results of our due diligence on the 3TG used in our in-scope products are noted in our annual filings, which can be found here.
Learn more
Read our latest Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) Report for more information about Hasbro’s commitment to human rights and ethical sourcing.
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