Health and safety

Some of the most common nonconformances to HP’s Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC) relate to the health and safety provisions. As a result, several of our capability-building programs focus on this area.

Greater China

Fire safety and emergency preparedness training

Emergency preparedness, particularly with regard to fire safety, is one of the most common nonconformances identified during our audits. The three most common problems relate to:

• Inadequate procedures for emergency preparedness
• Inadequate firefighting equipment installation and checking
• A lack of knowledge of electrical safety

HP has made conformance with the fire safety and emergency preparedness provision of HP’s EICC a priority due to fires reported at Chinese factories. Our global risk management, regional procurement, and supply chain social and environmental responsibility (SER) teams are collaborating on projects to reduce that risk.

We believe that practical and professional training is needed to enhance suppliers’ knowledge and skills for fire prevention. In 2009, our supply chain SER program introduced fire safety and emergency preparedness training. External training institute WSP (a global provider of environmental, health and safety, and risk consulting services) led the training and taught suppliers how to introduce firefighting equipment and procedures, management systems, effective preventative measures and fire law reviews (all are common issues identified in our audits). HP held two workshops in Shenzhen and Kunshan lasting two days, which 48 suppliers attended.

HP also added a specific fire safety module to our audit protocol for 15 audits in 2009. The additional detail encourages auditors to have deeper conversations with factory managers about fire safety and to give suppliers the understanding and tools to use in the future.

Latin America

Health of women working in the electronics industry

The Health Enables Returns project (HERproject) was launched by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) in 2007, based on research funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The research revealed that the general and reproductive health needs of women working in the electronics industry were going unmet at a time when they had begun to make up a larger proportion of the manufacturing workforce in emerging economies. Those needs related to issues such as breast cancer, diabetes, hypertension, human papilloma virus, cervical cancer, obesity, nutrition, and family planning and reproductive health education, especially for single mothers.

In 2008, HP joined the project in Mexico, initiating a health training program in two supplier factories. The program helps female workers meet their health needs by improving their awareness and access to services through partnerships between companies, factories and local nonprofit service organizations. The training involved health assessments of female workers followed by peer health educator (PHE) training. In 2009 BSR reported that the project was very effective. Some of its findings were:

• Impacts on workers’ health knowledge and behavior and attitudes toward the factory were very pronounced at one factory, moderate at the other.
• Production management at one supplier was very satisfied by the positive impact on health, workplace satisfaction and reduced turnover generated by the program without disrupting production. Management at the other supplier had a more qualified response, noting the increased health awareness and the interest among men to participate in such a program, but regretting difficulties related to project execution.

HP extended the program in late 2009 to two sites in China owned by HP suppliers. We expect more sites to participate in 2010. BSR published a report on the HERproject in 2010 that includes a case study about the work done at one of the HP suppliers in Mexico.