What’s the issue?

Around the world, it is estimated there are currently 40 million people trapped in modern slavery. The Australian Department of Home Affairs defines modern slavery as situations where coercion, threats or deception are used to exploit people and undermine their freedom. Examples of common modern slavery practices today include servitude, forced labour, forced marriage, the worst forms of child labour, debt bondage, deceptive recruiting for labour or services and human trafficking.

In today’s highly globalised world where supply chains are long and complex, modern slavery presents a serious issue that all businesses need to work together to unite against and eradicate.

What are we doing?

Since 2016, as part of Wesfarmers, we have released an annual modern slavery statement. The statement summarises the steps taken by Officeworks, and Wesfarmers more broadly, to identify and mitigate the risk of modern slavery in our operations and supply chains. We seek to work with our suppliers and non-government organisations to remediate and scale impact and promote a coordinated approach to tackling complex modern slavery issues.

All suppliers of goods and services must adhere to our Ethical Sourcing & Modern Slavery policy, which outlines the minimum standards required to work with us. To date, we have mapped over 28,000 of our products to the primary site of manufacturing, with 578 manufacturers involved in our ethical sourcing audit program. We support this approach with other targeted initiatives such as foreign migrant worker assessments, used in countries where the risk of forced labour is higher due to the level of migrant workers. During the year, we developed a bespoke self-assessment questionnaire to enable us to assess modern-slavery risk and corresponding corrective actions which all medium and high-risk service providers were required to complete.

We recognise there are inherent and urgent issues relating worker exploitation within the Australian cleaning industry, and this year became a member of the Cleaning Accountability Framework (CAF). CAF is an organisation that brings businesses, unions, government, and workers together to help improve the labour conditions within the Australian cleaning industry. Through our membership, our aim is to contribute to the development of the retail certification standards to improve outcomes for workers.

Throughout the year, we focused on building a greater awareness and understanding of modern slavery across our business. We launched an online modern slavery training module that was completed by over 300 of our team members and conducted targeted training on how to identify instances of forced labour.

Focus for FY2022

We will continue to work with our suppliers, partners, and non-government organisations to investigate and remediate allegations of modern slavery, and expand our supply chain transparency beyond the primary site of manufacturing, beginning with those supply chains most at risk of modern slavery.

Learn more about another 2025 commitment