Our corporate responsibility and ESG disclosures are consistent with our management team’s philosophy
and reputation for transparency. We recognize that our stockholders increasingly want more and more information about human rights and other ESG topics, and we believe we have been responsive. Our disclosure program is not static, however. We intend
to continue reporting on our ESG and human rights risk monitoring and our progress in mitigating risk in future Corporate Responsibility Reports and proxy statements.
We Already Report on our Human Rights Risk Assessment and Mitigation
We have made significant disclosures about human rights in our Corporate Responsibility Report and our proxy statement, including:
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How we consult with our stakeholders, such as our employees, growers, and communities, for their input on how our
business is impacting or will impact them and hear their views about how we can remediate adverse impacts.
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Our processes to assess human rights risks with respect to employee pay and benefits, equal opportunity,
diversity and inclusion, employee safety, grower costs, and our impact on the environment.
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The process by which management continually reviews our operational performance, which can reveal unintended
impacts on human rights, and our efforts to remediate these impacts, like re-training supervisors, increasing pay levels, or improving worker conditions.
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Below are some examples of these disclosures.
Employee Safety
We discuss at
length in our Corporate Responsibility Report our occupational health and safety programs, which
are overseen by our president’s safety committee.
The committee meets quarterly to set specific safety goals, benchmark progress towards those goals, and adjust our programs as needed. The report also discusses our executive management committee’s weekly review of the previous week’s
safety record at all our facilities. Specifically, the committee reviews a list of every accident reported at each facility during the week.
This process
of risk identification and assessment leads to real results. During 2018, the executive committee noticed an upward trend in “slip and fall” accidents at our processing plants. The committee met with our certified safety professionals to
discuss the trend and potential solutions. To remediate the issue, we decided to purchase slip-resistant footwear customized for the role of each individual employee, as noted in the Corporate Responsibility Report. As a result of our process, the
incident rate of “slip and fall” accidents in our processing plants has dropped significantly.
Another measure we have taken as a result of our
risk assessment process is setting the line speeds at our processing plants at 75 birds per minute (BPM). This is the slowest line speed in our industry and is well below the maximum speed allowed by the USDA of 175 bpm. We took this action to
reduce employee stress and injury, as discussed in our proxy statement.
The Corporate Responsibility Report also discusses our five board-certified
safety professionals, who, with outside consultants and ergonomists, continuously design, update and audit our safety practices to ensure our safety programs achieve our goal of maintaining the safest work environment in our industry. Indeed, as
noted in our 2018 Corporate Responsibility Report, Sanderson Farms has the lowest number of OSHA citations in the industry over the past five years.
Environmental Risk
We believe
that the protection of the environment is a human rights issue. Our Corporate Responsibility Report and proxy statement describe at length many recent initiatives that our environmental services team has
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