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Contents
Without a shared understanding and commitment from all businesses with their partners, efforts to address the root causes of GBVH will remain ineffective.
Businesses are required under human rights guidance,1 and increasingly under mandatory legislation, to conduct thorough human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) to address2 risks, including GBVH. Addressing GBVH protects people’s physical and psychosocial safety and security, whilst also enabling safer, more conducive workplaces that improve worker retention and productivity.
Yet, tools such as social and ethical audits often fail to identify GBVH or capture its scale. This gap poses risks not only to workers’ human rights but also to businesses, including reputational damage, legal liability, and financial costs from ineffective or redundant efforts.
Given the complexity and widespread nature of GBVH, effectively preventing it requires collaborative approaches developed with rightsholders3 — particularly diverse groups of women and LGBTQI+4 workers, where contextually relevant — and their representatives, including trade unions.
These principles are grounded in:
- Gender-responsive human rights due diligence (GRHRDD)5 - Businesses should identify, prevent, and mitigate risks, and remediate harms that affect workers on the basis of gender, while monitoring and accounting for impacts of their actions. A GRHRDD approach recognises that gender intersects with other social characteristics, shaping workers’ experiences differently, which needs to be taken into consideration when responding to workers’ needs. This approach actively addresses root causes, including beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that perpetuate GBVH.
- Accountability and prevention focused on stopping perpetrators – Victims and survivors6 are not responsible for GBVH. Actions should foster cultures of prevention and active bystander intervention, reduce risks by addressing enabling workplace practices and hold perpetrators accountable.
- Victim and survivor centred approach – Decisions and actions should prioritise victims’ and survivors’ safety, needs and wishes from first report through to remedy. This reinforces workers’ agency and centres workers in the decision-making process around prevention, protection and remedy, consistent with meaningful stakeholder engagement.7
Critical point: Independent worker representation
Workers should have the freedom to choose how they organise for collective representation. Businesses should recognise and engage with independent trade unions, which are the most effective and legitimate form of worker representation, rooted in freedom of association. Trade unions benefit from legal protections, resources, and autonomy from employer influence.
Where unions cannot operate or are absent, businesses should support the next best form of independent worker representation, such as democratically elected worker representatives in the short to medium term. These should not be used to substitute or undermine the formation of unions.
While these bodies can facilitate dialogue and make recommendations, they lack the legal standing, resources, and bargaining power of trade unions and cannot replace collective bargaining. Only trade unions can negotiate employment terms on equal footing with employers.
Businesses should support policy and legislative reforms that recognise and uphold the rights of all workers, including migrant workers and those in the informal economy, to form and join organisations of their own choosing, bargain collectively and participate fully in social dialogue mechanisms at all levels.