WHEREAS:
TJX Companies (“the Company”) sources from approximately 21,000 vendors in over 100 countries, including locations where forced, child, and prison labor are known to exist in the manufacturing chain of product categories sold in TJX stores;
While TJX’s Vendor Code of Conduct prohibits forced, child, and prison labor, TJX does not conduct or require routine audits of factories to confirm compliance beyond the producers of private label merchandise (reportedly a very small portion of inventory);
Failure to disclose adequate due diligence mechanisms has garnered TJX low scores on several human rights benchmarks including KnowTheChain, Remake Fashion Accountability Report, and Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB). CHRB compares companies against the preeminent UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP) and scored TJX only 4 of 26 possible points in 2020. UNGPs specify due diligence principles for human rights commitments, including assessing actual and potential human rights impacts, integrating and acting upon findings, tracking responses, and communicating remedies;
Novel scientific testing increases the risk of previously unknown violations becoming associated with the Company if laboratory isotope testing finds evidence of products made from forced labor in Company stores;
Lastly, buyer responsibility expectations are increasing. John Sherman of Harvard Kennedy School’s Corporate Responsibility Initiative recently described that “[w]hen huge multinational enterprises require their contractual counterparties to comply with the UNGPs, procurement lawyers are incentivized to address the deficiencies of current supply chain contracts from an HRDD perspective.” Sherman explains that draft model supply chain contracts are under development that would shift contracts from a “representations and warranties approach to a human rights due diligence regime, in which buyers and suppliers would share the responsibility of addressing supply chain human rights abuse”[1];
Shareholders believe that material risk to shareholder value may exist due to the Company’s limited supplier compliance program.