Principle #6 - Promote fair competition including respect for intellectual and other property rights, and not offer, pay or accept bribes.
Every year at holiday time, a letter is sent to all suppliers, reminding them of P&G's policy not to accept gifts of substantive value from suppliers to P&G employees. This includes offers of tickets or entertainment.
Principle #7 - Work with governments and communities in which we do business to improve the quality of life in those communities - their educational, cultural, economic and social well-being, and seek to provide training and opportunities for workers from disadvantaged backgrounds.
P&G has begun to design products specific to the needs of low-income consumers in developing countries. For example, our initiatives to date include:
- A drink mix that addresses micro-nutrient malnutrition in children (vitamin A, Iron and Iodine) in the developing world.
- A product for in-home purification of drinking water at a cost of U.S. $0.01 per liter. The product has been shown in clinical studies to reduce diarrhea in children by 33-50%, and is effective not only on bacteria, but on viruses, parasites and even many heavy metals such as arsenic. In FY 2004/05, P&G in partnership with numerous NGOs and the U.S. and U.K. governments, distributed 21 million sachets of product (each sachet treating 10 liters of water) into disaster relief situations, and into 3 social markets in Haiti, Uganda and Pakistan where we license the marketing and distribution to an NGO, Population Services International (PSI).
- A product introduced into the Philippines and Mexico that greatly simplifies the task of hand washing, saving women and girls an hour or more per day. In the Philippines, where the wash is typically done in one bucket followed by 3 rinse buckets, our product eliminates two of the rinse buckets (50% water savings) and yields brighter clean clothes.
Principle #8 - Promote the application of these Principles by those with whom we do business.
In 2000, after endorsing the Global Sullivan Principles (GSP), P&G did a gap analysis on its existing policies versus the GSP, and then created internal policies to fill those gaps. The
biggest substantive gap was in applying the principles to our supply chain. Since then, we
have implemented the following to fill that gap:
- Published P&G's sustainability expectations of suppliers in a booklet, "Sustainability Guidelines for Supplier Relations" which is available on our website http://www.pg.com/company/our_commitment/sustainability.jhtml
- Incorporated our expectations into our standard supplier contract language.
- Developed an assessment and tracking system to capture identified outages of our expectations by suppliers, and then track progress in remediating those outages.
- Developed an on-line training program to train P&G people worldwide, whose jobs entail being in suppliers operations on a routine basis.
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