Employee relations and labour rights
We respect and uphold fundamental labour rights and determinedly pursue constructive employee relations in every area of our business.
Why employee relations and labour rights matter
The way we treat our employees, and their representatives, is fundamental to our success – and never more so as our landside operations expand. We are committed to respecting labour rights and ensuring constructive employee relations in all our workplaces.
These commitments are based on core ILO conventions and internationally accepted frameworks from the UN and OECD, as well as compliance with applicable local legislation where we operate.

Our employee relations and labour rights targets: 2023
Our ambition
We offer decent, fair and equal working conditions and strive to make Maersk a good place to work for all employees. We identify risks for third-party labour and implement mitigating and preventive actions. We also involve employees in our efforts to ensure that we adequately consider our responsibilities towards our people as our business grows.

Priorities and actions
Managing our commitments
We manage our employee and labour rights commitments through a rule in our central governance system, Commit, as well as through policies covering specific areas of our business.
Maersk has an established Employee Relations Council, which sets direction and monitors our progress, and a network of global, regional and local employee relations specialists. All our employees receive training on employee relations and labour rights.
Driving better labour practices all the way
Beyond our ongoing activities, we are also investing in solutions to emerging issues resulting from our business growth or external developments. Areas where this is driving stronger focus include third-party labour working conditions.
Our Global Integrator-strategy has a built-in expansion for our labour rights-related activities on land. This means that we assume responsibility for ESG challenges related to our customers’ supply chain, so that we drive improvements together – all the way.
Growing and modernising responsibly
Our strategy to transform global logistics will inevitably change and modernise some of our ways of working. For example, our focus on digitisation will include more extensive use of automation, particularly in our port terminals.
We continue to build an approach for engaging employee representatives in these processes and actions in a timely manner to secure that our growth strategy adequately considers our responsibility towards employees.

Maersk Sustainability Report 2021
