The cornerstone of PUMA’s social accountability is our Code of Conduct and S.A.F.E. Standards. This is the foundation of all our stakeholder engagements – workers, suppliers, NGOs, unions, investors and customers.

In response to events that transpired in one of our suppliers in South America, we established our first multi-stakeholder meeting in November 2003. The Talks at Banz has since evolved from a parley between adversaries into an annual constructive dialogue between PUMA and our key stakeholders. The Talks at Banz is a venue for the exchange of new ideas for PUMA’s ethical direction and the review of existing work. Attendees come from the whole breadth of corporate social responsibility, from Social Responsible Investment (SRI) analysts to academe to unions, as well as PUMA’s key staff in Sourcing, Corporate Communications, Works Council and S.A.F.E.

Since January 2004, PUMA is a participating member of the Fair Labor Association (FLA). The aim of this non-profit organization is “combining the efforts of industry, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), colleges and universities to promote adherence to international labor standards and improve working conditions worldwide”. The partnership with the FLA requires a certain percentage of PUMA’s suppliers to be independently monitored by FLA-accredited monitoring institutes every year. Furthermore, membership in the FLA allows any individual or group (for example: workers, NGOs, etc.) to report possible violations of PUMA’s Code of Conduct at any of PUMA’s supplier factories directly to the FLA.

PUMA has also been a long-standing Sustaining Member of the World Federation of Sporting Goods Industries (WFSGI). The WFSGI is an independent non-profit association formed by the industry suppliers, national organizations and sporting goods industry related businesses. WFSGI is the official non-governmental association recognized by the International Olympic Committee as the industry representative within the IOC family. PUMA currently serves as Vice President on the Board of Directors (Representatives from Europe, 2004-2007) and as well as the Corporate Social Responsibility Committee.

PUMA has long recognized that tackling supply chain issues is an arduous process for suppliers, workers and our own internal staff. We acknowledge that suppliers are constantly besieged with forces beyond their control that impinge on their ability to meet our S.A.F.E. standards, from the regulatory environment in the communities that they operate in to our own buying practices. Hindered as well by their internal lack of capacity, we have been making tentative steps to address this.

We believe that a factory’s inability to meet the Code of Conduct does not signal a lack of interest in fair labor and environmental practice. By providing the environment to learn more from their peers as well as from experts in the business, factories will be better able to achieve compliance.

PUMA’s capacity building program began as a one-off training course in China in 2003. Since then, we have inked partnerships with key international and local organizations in order to:

(1) address critical issues in the field of labor and environmental compliance with like-minded partners, particularly issues that cannot be resolved by one brand alone, and
(2) for PUMA to learn how to better develop and manage supplier capacity building projects through other experts in the field.

Through these partnerships we have been able to make progress in systematically identifying the most critical issues that we need to address singularly as a brand, and issues that we need to face with the rest of the sports goods industry. Many of these projects are currently ongoing, along with a few internally developed projects in worker education and environmental management awareness. Updates to these projects will be provided on a regular basis.

List of project partners

• Fair Labor Association
• World Federation of Sporting Goods Industries CSR Committee
• German Code of Conduct Round Table
• Labor Action China
• JO-IN
• Women’s Alliance for Development
• Balkan Institute for Labor and Social Policy
• ITGLWF
• GTZ
• German Network of Business Ethics, Eben
• UN Global Compact
• Global Reporting Initiative

Transparency is a key element to our accountability. We have made our supplier list available to the public through the Fair Labor Association.