Over the past year, the Global Electronics Council has hosted rigorous workshops with an esteemed group of stakeholders to revise the Purchaser Guide for Addressing Labor & Human Rights Impacts in Technology Procurement – we are thrilled to officially announce the launch of this revised guide.

This Guide is an update to the original Guide issued in late 2017. GEC was prompted to develop the Guide by institutional purchasers, globally, who approached GEC and shared their challenges with assuring that the technology products they procured were made in a socially responsible manner. Technology companies, likewise, shared their frustration about responding to an increasing number of labor and human rights-related procurement questions. In response, GEC created a Guide that addressed both parties’ concerns by providing purchasers with a concise set of labor and human rights procurement questions that could be clearly understood by technology companies, and by identifying credible supporting documentation that technology companies could provide purchasers in response.

GEC’s goal for this Guide revision is to retain the concise, pragmatic nature of the original Guide while at the same time address purchasers’ requests for additional questions and supporting documentation examples that allow them to better assess vendor performance on addressing negative labor and human rights issues.