B Lab's New Standards Impact Topic: Human Rights
B Lab’s standards define the performance that a company must meet and continuously improve upon to achieve and maintain B Corp Certification. Since 2006, we have evolved the standards to improve their impactfulness and clarify what it means to be a leading business, incorporating feedback from diverse stakeholders.
To achieve these goals, the new standards require companies to meet specific requirements across seven Impact Topics. While we have developed the new standards with the existing standards in mind, you can expect to see new topics and evolved requirements where topics overlap, designed to improve business impact.
After all, the B Corp community is built on the principle of continuous improvement.
Respecting human rights is no longer optional for businesses: it’s an expectation. With the Human Rights Impact Topic, B Lab’s new standards align with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), marking a major shift in how companies are held accountable for their impacts on people. In this blog, Bernard Gouw, Senior Social Standards Manager at B Lab Global, explains what due diligence really means, why it matters, and how companies of all sizes can start making it part of how they do business.
Describe the impact topic in a nutshell:
The Human Rights Impact Topic asks companies to understand how their operations and value chains may involve negative human rights impacts, and take action to prevent and mitigate them. This impact topic represents a long-awaited alignment of our standards with the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights (UNGPs).
What is the purpose of the topic, and why does it matter in today’s world?
The adoption of the UNGPs in 2011 was a game-changer. For the first time, there was a globally recognized expectation that all companies have a responsibility to “respect human rights”. And they do this through human rights due diligence.
In Dutch, “due diligence” is informally referred to as “anti-wegkijk”, which means “don’t look away”. It perfectly captures what has been wrong for so long. Companies either didn’t know where to look, or when they did, they looked away and ignored human rights issues.
More specifically, human rights due diligence asks companies to operate with care and be mindful of potential negative impacts on people. This includes employees, workers in the supply chain, buyers, consumers, and clients. It’s a big and perhaps daunting scope, but the key to due diligence is knowing where to focus. And this requires companies to operate with their “eyes open”, being self-aware, proactive, and sincere in looking at how their operations impact people’s lives. It also requires constant learning and a commitment to continuous improvement over time.
Eventually, human rights due diligence should become second nature, much like how food safety or financial due diligence have become mainstream expectations of companies.
How has the emphasis of the topic changed throughout the development process and what factors contributed to that?
From the onset, the objective was clear: to align our standards with the UNGPs. What’s challenging is that the UNGPs and most human rights standards and frameworks were written with large companies in mind. A major part of our development journey was translating that to the contexts of smaller companies, which represent the majority of the B Corp Community. This is what led B Lab to partner with Fairtrade International in writing ‘People and planet in business: A simple guide to how small and micro companies can start or strengthen their due diligence’. This is the first human rights due diligence guide for micro-sized companies.
Those familiar with the drafts shared in early 2024 will notice three changes:
We created a new requirement to guide companies with operations in conflict-affected situations
We added expectations for larger companies to remediate negative impacts
We added a requirement on investment screening
Further changes are summarized in this article: Summary of the changes to the B Lab’s New Standards
What Impact Topic requirement(s) are you most excited about - and why?
I’m excited about the package of supplier-related requirements in HR Requirement 4. They represent a much-needed boost in our standards for managing social impacts in the supply chain. One requirement I’m particularly excited about is HR Sub-requirement 4.5. It’s about contracting with suppliers, a source of systemic issues in supply chains. It builds on work from the Responsible Contracting Project.
In this requirement, we ask companies to compare their expectations of suppliers to their own commitments. And crucially, this is done through a legal lens. The goal is to achieve balance and avoid empty or unfair expectations of suppliers. For example, Supplier Codes of Conduct have become common practice, often requiring suppliers to promise they won’t do anything bad, which is unbalanced, unfair, and unrealistic. This requirement has companies confront how fairly they’re treating their suppliers through their procurement documents. At scale, this means correcting power imbalances between buyers and suppliers, which in many ways reflect power imbalances between the Global North (where many buyers are) and Global South (where many suppliers are).
What similarities are there between this new Impact Topic and the existing standards?
The Human Rights Impact Topic introduces a lot of content that does not exist in the existing standards. One notable exception is in the Baseline Requirements for MNCs, the extra standard for a multinational corporation (MNC), which requires them to have a human rights policy. In the new standards, this is required of all companies that are medium-sized and larger.
Where are the biggest growth areas for companies?
The Human Rights Impact Topic ensures companies take a much-needed leap forward on human rights due diligence. For some companies, the content may feel new because of the specific framing and language borrowed from the UNGPs. But many are already practicing aspects of human rights due diligence without knowing it or without calling it as such. So they won’t be starting from nothing.
Actions like protecting employees, improving working conditions in the supply chain, and ensuring products going to market are safe, are all part of human rights due diligence. A difference will be that we now require it more deliberately and consistently. We also expect companies to consider the broadest range of potential negative impacts. For example, companies manufacturing alcoholic beverages or sugary treats may already be working on their supply chain practices but will be challenged to also consider health impacts on consumers. Likewise, a marketing agency that doesn’t have a significant supply chain will be challenged to consider who their clients are and what impacts their services have on people.
What is your biggest tip for companies working towards the new standards / this topic in particular?
Companies can take these initial steps to start achieving the intent of the HR Impact Topic.
Download a copy of the UNGPs for easy reference [EN] [ES] [FR]. These can be read alongside the “Frequently Asked Questions” document [EN] [ES] [FR] [PT] and “An interpretive guide” [EN] [ES] [FR].
For micro and small companies, and anyone less familiar with human rights due diligence, read this simple guide by B Lab and Fairtrade International.
Particularly for larger companies, read through the requirements looking closely at how they build on one another.
Look at the requirements that the HR and ESC impact topics have in common to identify ways to combine them into one action or process. For example, consultant companies can assess the social and environmental risks related to clients in one go.
Why are JEDI and Human Rights separate impact topics?
JEDI and human rights have deep conceptual links with one another. Their intentions and eventual goals are the same: that all people are treated with respect and live with dignity. Nevertheless, they remain distinct topics in the new standards because they inhabit distinct spaces in the “sustainability ecosystem”. Frameworks, standards, tools, and guidance often focus on one of the two. And within companies, they are often tackled by different teams.
Human rights in the context of business (‘Business & Human Rights’) is usually framed in terms of human rights due diligence, focusing primarily on preventing harm to people. This stems from the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights. JEDI on the other hand, is not explicitly rooted in any such framework and refers both to preventing harm and pursuing positive impacts.
With time, we expect to see JEDI and human rights converge in the “sustainability ecosystem”. But for now we treat them as distinct despite their conceptual links. Want to learn more about the other Impact Topics in B Lab's new standards?
🪧 Purpose &Stakeholder Governance
🪧 Government Affairs & Collective Action
🪧 Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (JEDI)