Our Workplace Standards explicitly prohibit our suppliers from employing children under 15 years of age, or below the age for the completion of compulsory education if that is over 15. This is in line with international standards as set by the International Labour Organization (ILO), which defines child labor as “work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development.” This includes work that interferes with the schooling of children.

Over the past 25 years, we worked with our suppliers to eliminate child labor in all our Tier 1 supplier facilities. We have developed specific guidelines for effectively managing the recruitment process and strengthening human resources systems at the factory level to prevent child labor, ensure the protection of juvenile workers, and remediate instances of child labor, in the rare cases where they occur.

Our approach to children's rights

We are committed to respecting children’s rights. We do so through our efforts to eliminate child labor and provide decent work for young people in our global supply chain, and through our commitment to the UNICEF Children’s Rights and Business Principles (CRBPs).

• Commitment to respecting children’s rights: Our commitment to children’s rights is aligned with the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the principle that: “In all actions concerning children…the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” (Article 3, CRC). We have helped UNICEF develop guidelines for our industry to more effectively address adverse impacts on children and working parents in the supply chain, and have participated in the development of a practical toolkit for businesses to integrate children’s rights into their sustainability strategies and responsible sourcing frameworks.
• Ensuring products and services are safe: Our product safety team ensures that all products likely to be used by children are designed and tested in line with relevant national and international standards. Moreover, product safety legislation that sets out specific requirements for defined children ages or size formats, is applied with a special level of care. We continue to lead our industry in safety-related chemical management and physical product requirements and seek to ensure that products and services for children or to which children may be exposed are safe and do not cause harm. Our product labelling and information for instance is clear, accurate and complete, including age restrictions and consumer guidance. This enables parents and children to make informed decisions. We also seek to prevent – and eliminate – the risk that products and associated services could be used to abuse, exploit, or otherwise harm children in any way. This includes developing social media and privacy policies to protect the rights of children who seek to interact with our business through e-commerce or online platforms.
• The right to play and child safeguarding in sport: As a global sporting goods company, we champion children’s right to play, including access to sports. To achieve this, we have launched and participated in several initiatives. We have worked with the Ministry of Education in China, providing training for around 50,000 Chinese sports teachers, who in turn are teaching football skills in more than 20,000 schools, reaching 20 million youngsters in total. In partnership with UNESCO, adidas has also supported the FIFA Football for Schools program, which aims to make football more accessible to children by incorporating football activities into the physical education curriculum. This international sports program targets over 700 million school children. 

As a sponsor of clubs, players, and sports bodies – such as FIFA – we have engaged with our stakeholders and partners on the topic of child safeguarding, especially for young professionals. This has included outreach to the Centre for Sports and Human Rights, which actively promotes the safeguarding of children around major sporting events such as the FIFA World Cup. adidas is a member of the Centre’s Advisory Council, along with UN agencies, governments, unions, and other civil society groups.

adidas strictly prohibits the use of any form of forced labor or human trafficking across all of our company operations and in our global supply chain. We have a zero-tolerance approach to forced labor, human trafficking and slavery. 

Click here to read more about our approach. 

We are committed to eliminating the payment of recruitment costs and fees by workers to obtain or secure their employment. This commitment is reflected in our Policy on Responsible Recruitment and Fair Treatment of Migrant Workers and our Guidelines on Employment Standards. We have also signed the American Apparel Footwear Association and Fair Labor Association [AAFA/FLA] Commitment to Responsible Recruitment.

We have partnered with the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and civil society to protect the rights of migrant workers who are employed within our supply chain. This includes developing guidance and industry best practice to eliminate the exploitative recruitment practices of intermediaries and unscrupulous employment agencies or labor brokers, as well as ensuring freedom of movement, equal treatment, and proper employment contracts for migrant workers.

Our partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) from 2017 to 2022 focused on promoting ethical recruitment practices, specialized training and due diligence measures for our business partners in receiving countries and for recruitment agencies in sending countries. As a result of this partnership, nearly 100 of our Tier 2 suppliers in Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and South Korea were trained on how to identify, mitigate, and address human rights and labor risks for migrant workers, and over 40 labor recruiters were trained on ethical recruitment principles and the adidas Workplace Standards. The partnership also informed the development of the IOM Migrant Worker Guidelines for Employers, which provide practical guidance to business enterprises on how to recruit and employ international migrant workers ethically and responsibly.

We are committed to respecting the rights of human rights defenders (HRDs), as outlined in our Human Rights Defenders Policy. A HRD can be any person or group of persons working to promote human rights locally, regionally, or internationally through peaceful means. HRDs can be of any gender, of any age, from any part of the world, and with diverse backgrounds and different interests. 

In the context of adidas’ own operations and the business activities that occur in our supply chain, we recognize trade union organizers, environmental interest groups, human rights campaigners, and labor rights advocates as HRDs. 

Over the past five years, we have intervened and sought the reinstatement and/or financial compensation for over a dozen trade union leaders and organizers, where we have found them to have been unfairly dismissed, discriminated against, or intimidated in breach of our Workplace Standards. These cases were identified through our own monitoring activities, investigations triggered by worker complaints, or grievances received from external advocacy groups or trade unions. Worker reinstatements have taken place in sourcing locations including Cambodia, El Salvador, Indonesia, and Turkey.

Throughout the history of our human rights and labor program, we have frequently taken action to address the treatment of HRDs, whose activities are linked to issues in our global supply chain. Examples of our efforts to support HRDs include:

• Cambodia, 2022: In May 2022, negotiations were underway between the Can Sports Shoes Co. Ltd. footwear factory in Cambodia and four trade unions that had threatened to strike. The unions were demanding better access to private food vendors and a faster transfer of union fee deductions from workers’ salaries when they switched trade union affiliation, which was a frequent occurrence given the ten plant-level unions operating at the factory. These negotiations were interrupted when two of the union leaders were arrested and held in police custody. The next day, the workers went ahead with their strike, gathering peacefully in front of the factory gates. At that time, it was reported that a third union leader had been arrested. Within 24 hours of the first arrest, all three union leaders were released by the police after signing a pledge to call off the strike. Initially, the local authorities claimed that the detentions were for inciting criminal activity. However, there was no evidence to support this claim and the union leaders were released without charge. adidas investigated the case and concluded that the root cause was interference by the local authorities who feared that the strike would disrupt upcoming elections. We promptly wrote to the Cambodian Ministry of Labor requesting an investigation and highlighting the local authority’s failure to uphold freedom of association as guaranteed under Cambodian law. By giving visibility to the case and calling for government intervention, we sought to prevent future interference with trade union activities in Kampong Chhnang province. 

• Vietnam, 2016: This case involved the detention of two labor rights advocates who met with workers who had been laid off after a fire destroyed the main production building of Yupoong Vietnam, an accessories supplier. We learned of the detention and subsequent release of the two individuals, who are affiliated with Viet Labor, an overseas labor rights group. We assured Viet Labor that we would act in line with our policy of protecting individuals and advocates from any infringement of their rights (freedom of association, freedom of expression, etc.) during active disputes and investigations. We wrote directly to the Chairman of the Dong Nai People’s Committee, and called on the provincial government and the local police to exercise maximum restraint in dealing with protests and not to interfere where individuals are acting peacefully and within the law.

• Cambodia, 2015: In 2015, we were approached by a US labor rights organization, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), regarding our position on the legal action taken by the Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC) against six independent trade union leaders in Cambodia for their alleged involvement in the destruction of property during the 2014 nationwide protests. We explained that we had been very clear in our communications with GMAC and our suppliers. And that we believed the criminal charges were without merit and that the case should be withdrawn. Throughout 2014, we met with the GMAC secretariat and individual GMAC board members on more than one occasion to deliver that message. And we repeated that message in subsequent face-to-face meetings in 2015.
• China, 2014: This case involved the detention of two labor advocates who had supported striking workers at the Yue Yuen industrial complex in Dongguan, in the People’s Republic of China. We engaged on a daily basis with civil society groups in southern China as we tracked the local government’s handling of the largest strike ever in the PRC, involving some 40,000 workers. Two advocates from the Shenzhen Chunfeng Labour Disputes Services Centre who had been advising the workers were arrested and detained by police. On the day the strike ended, one of the advocates was released, but the other remained in detention. The reasons for his arrest were not disclosed by the authorities, although it was rumored that he was being held for incitement and “causing trouble.” We petitioned the local mayor to release the advocate. Our action was timed with an online civil society campaign. Three weeks later, the individual was released without charge.

Women make up over half of adidas’ current global employee base and are the dominant gender in our supply chain; more than 70% of workers making our products are women.

Our approach to ensuring the equal treatment of women in our supply chain is closely aligned with the expectations laid out in the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). The underlying principles of CEDAW are reflected in the language of our Workplace Standards and our supporting Guidelines on Employment Standards, which our business partners must follow.

We aim to bring a gender lens to our strategic suppliers’ operations ensuring that all workers have the same opportunities, rights, and obligations. To support this goal, we launched our Gender Strategy for Business Partners in 2022 to guide our strategic suppliers in this process. In addition, we introduced a self-assessment tool, which is designed to identify gender gaps in supplier operating practices and procedures and provide the building blocks they need to develop their own gender strategy. Since 2023, suppliers have annually been monitoring their progress against improvement plans aimed at closing potential identified gaps.

Since 2023, all strategic suppliers have been conducting annual worker surveys on gender equality, which are designed to evaluate worker experience and perception of gender equality in the workplace, obtain worker feedback on gender equality practices in factories, and provide strategic suppliers with a reference point for continuous improvement. More than 46,000 workers participate in these surveys each year.

We have also implemented tailored programs and initiatives in collaboration with organizations aimed at securing the rights and ensuring the health and safety of female workers in our supply chain. Selected examples of such programs and initiatives are outlined below.

• Women’s Leadership Program (WLP): This program was launched as a pilot in Vietnam in 2016 and was expanded in 2017 to countries including Indonesia, China, Cambodia, Myanmar, and India. To date, over 5,000 female supervisors in our strategic supplier factories have joined the program and benefited from tailored training to support career development and job promotion. We closely track the progress of workers who complete this training initiative, and since 2016, approximately 340 female supervisors have been promoted to higher positions as a result of their participation in the program. In 2024 more than 1,600 supervisors from 76 factories were trained as part of the WLP.

• Americas Group (El Salvador and Honduras): Through its active participation in the multi-stakeholder initiative, the Americas Group (AG), adidas has been collaborating with other brands, the Maquila Solidarity Network, the Fair Labor Association (FLA), and local labor rights and feminist CSOs on finding sustainable remediation to macro-level issues heavily affecting women maquila workers. Much of the AG’s work in Central America derives from the Women’s Labor Rights Agenda for the Central American Maquiladora Industry, published in 2014 by the Central American Women’s Network in Support of Maquila Workers (REDCAM). As a priority, the AG has been focusing on supporting local efforts in identifying sustainable ways for employers to meet their legal obligations around child-care provision. In addition, in 2017, the AG began exploring possible ways to help improve how brands and factories prevent, identify, and remediate sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence in the workplace.
• Women’s Empowerment with Baidarie (Pakistan): Launched in 2017, this project aims to provide women with economic opportunities by strengthening their knowledge and skills. It has equipped home-based women workers impacted by the automation of the football stitching industry with locally marketable and demand–driven skills, creating opportunities for the induction of trained female workers into the formal sector and enabling women to set up their own profitable micro- and small-sized business enterprises.

Indigenous Peoples are generally identified as Tribal or First Nations peoples whose social, cultural, and economic conditions distinguish them from other sections of their national community. Their relationship with the land and natural resources on which they depend is inextricably linked to their identities, cultures, livelihoods, and physical and spiritual well-being. As a result, indigenous peoples are often disproportionately affected by climate change, environmental degradation, loss of resources and displacement, and face high levels of poverty and poor access to education, and health.

adidas is committed to respecting the rights of indigenous peoples in line with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ILO Convention No. 169 (Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention). We require our manufacturing partners to obtain free, prior, and informed consent for any greenfield developments that may require land acquisition in proximity to tribal areas, or in locations where land rights have been disputed. We have modeled our approach and expectations on IFC Performance Standard No.7: Indigenous Peoples and related IFC guidance on land acquisition.

In the upstream end of the value chain, we expect suppliers of raw materials such as cotton and rubber to conduct human rights and environmental due diligence and to follow standards that consider the rights of Indigenous peoples. 

Indigenous peoples may also face exploitation or misappropriation of their cultural and economic rights. When marketing and designing products, adidas strives to respect indigenous artwork, designs, symbols, and other forms of cultural expression. We have conducted internal training to raise awareness of the importance of protecting such rights.