In today’s globalized market where free trade is on the rise, companies have a significant impact, both positive and negative, on human rights. Operating worldwide, the JVCKENWOOD Group recognizes the need to respect the human rights of all stakeholders that have an interest in its operations, including employees and suppliers, while ensuring fair labor practices. We are taking a wide range of measures to fulfill our responsibilities as a global company by sharing our human rights policy and initiatives across the Group while establishing and administering a relevant management system.

Under the responsibility of the CEO, JVCKENWOOD Group's Sustainability Promotion Dept. takes the lead in implementing risk management related to human rights. In addition, we conduct annual risk surveillance at all business sites that specializes in human rights risk. We have also established a system to manage issues that require company-wide initiatives through the Company-wide Risk Management Committee. Please see Enterprise Risk Management for specific risk surveillance mechanisms.

The JVCKENWOOD Group identifies industry-specific human rights risks through risk surveillance and other mechanism. As a company engaged in global manufacturing, we recognize the need to consider not only the human rights of our employees, but also the human rights of local residents who may have an impact on our business activities and the human rights of a wide range of supply chains. In particular, we are strengthening our response to the issue of "prevention of child labor and forced labor in the supply chain" as an initiative to ensure respect for human rights. The JVCKENWOOD CSR Procurement Guidelines clearly prohibit child labor and forced labor, and we will make efforts to disseminate the guidelines so that all business partners can work appropriately.

The JVCKENWOOD Group requires all its employees complete Human Rights e-Learning in order to understand human rights initiatives based on the JVCKENWOOD Group Compliance Code of Conduct. In the training conducted in 2021, the new Human Rights Policy was explained in detail to disseminate and raise awareness among employees. In the questionnaire survey conducted after the training, 76% of the participants of this training answered that they had changed their awareness of human rights. We are also actively working to raise awareness of human rights among our employees by focusing on issues such as promoting diversity and preventing harassment in new employee training and managerial training.

The JVCKENWOOD Group maintains a whistle-blower system that enables employees to report on possible violations of any law or regulation, the JVCKENWOOD GROUP Compliance Code of Conduct, and other internal rules.

Ahead of the June 2020 enforcement of a new law requiring companies to provide a harassment hotline service as a measure to prevent workplace power harassment, we set up a harassment hotline in April 2017, enabling employees to report incidents of harassment. There were no incidents related to human rights violations occurred in FY2020.

Compliance/Internal Whistle-blower System

JVCKENWOOD promotes active dialogue between labor and management in recognition of the fact that trusting labor-management relations will boost the productivity and motivation of employees and lead to sustained growth for the company.

JVCKENWOOD has established labor agreements with the JVCKENWOOD Labor Union that represents all employees excluding managerial employees, with regard to the three rights of labor (the right to unionize, the right to collectively bargain, and the right to collectively act) and conducts negotiations/discussions on working conditions, etc. When making a practical change that may have a significant impact on the employees’ way of working, the management explains and discusses it with the union in advance, in accordance with the labor-management agreement.

Representatives of labor and management meet on a regular basis in informal management gatherings, financial results briefings, and special labor-management committee meetings to discuss institutional matters, and the agreements reached through these discussions are immediately put into place. In FY2020, 15 labor-management meetings were held to discuss matters such as changes to be made to the personnel system. In FY2021, we will further solidify the sound relations between labor and management by actively continuing to promote labor-management dialogue.