Advancing human rights

Our efforts are anchored in policies that apply across our business. Our Global Human Rights Principles outline our commitment to embed respect for human rights throughout our business activities. We published an update to our Global Human Rights Principles in January 2025 to better align with evolving business needs, international standards, and industry best practices. In addition, Amazon’s Supply Chain Standards, available in 23 languages and dialects, detail our expectations for all suppliers of goods and services for Amazon, including service providers, vendors, selling partners, contractors, and subcontractors.

In 2024, to mitigate human rights risks that may occur during supplier disengagement, we adopted responsible disengagement guidelines. We prioritize working with suppliers to encourage remediation whenever possible, using disengagement only as a last resort, because terminating business relationships removes the incentive for improvement and can negatively impact workers and communities.

Respect for human rights is everyone’s responsibility at Amazon. We embed this responsibility into our policy and governance framework and develop resources, guidance, and tools to help implement Amazon’s human rights strategy. We have a central team that works across the company to conduct human rights due diligence and integrate human rights considerations into business decisions. In addition, we strive to embed our human rights principles in employees’ everyday work by offering training and resources to help drive accountability at all levels.

All employees have access to online training on the company’s human rights commitments. We also offer modern slavery training, available in seven languages, which helps employees identify warning signs and report concerns to the appropriate authorities, as well as training on responsible purchasing practices for our sourcing and procurement teams.

We continue to refine our approach to assess, prioritize, and address human rights risks across our business activities. Our teams work to understand risks, strengthen prevention strategies, and integrate human rights and environmental considerations into everyday business decisions.

In 2020, Amazon conducted an enterprise-wide human rights saliency assessment to identify salient human rights risks under international standards. Since then, we have conducted an increasing number of business-specific due diligence assessments, including an Amazon Devices human rights impact assessment (2020), a Twitch human rights impact assessment (2023), an Amazon Private Brands human rights saliency assessment (2023), and a due diligence management systems review of Whole Foods Market (2023).

In 2024, we expanded our human rights and environmental due diligence (HREDD) work to encompass a broader range of key businesses and enterprise segments, including 10 business units such as AWS, Operations, Stores, Grocery, and Corporate Real Estate. Our methodology is grounded in international standards and combines country, sector, and product data with internal insights from worker feedback, among other sources.

The results of these HREDD assessments strengthen our understanding of systemic and business-specific risks and inform action plans to mitigate future risks. In 2024, we strengthened Amazon Private Brands' responsible sourcing practices by supporting suppliers in mitigating human rights risks and promoting continuous supply chain improvements. Following Amazon Private Brands' 2023 Human Rights Saliency Assessment, we prioritized areas such as chemicals management and fair wages, conducting deep-dive assessments including a fair wage benchmarking exercise across targeted sites in Bangladesh. We also used supplier feedback collected through Better Buying to improve sourcing and procurement strategies.

Addressing human rights challenges requires collaboration with stakeholders and industry partners who share our priorities. Our human rights due diligence strategy includes stakeholder engagement to promote accountability and to engage in collaborations. We collaborate with credible and innovative organizations to help improve working conditions across our supply chain.

Amazon’s Sustainability Exchange, a free, publicly available website offering previously proprietary information to help other companies seeking to make progress toward their sustainability goals, includes human rights as a focus area. Through the Amazon Sustainability Exchange, stakeholders can find fundamental steps for establishing a human rights program, case studies that showcase how others are implementing more sustainable practices across their operations, and resources and tools to empower businesses to take action.

By listening to the people connected to our business, we can better understand their experiences and concerns, address risks they face, remedy issues, and ultimately improve our workplace experience. Our grievance policies and practices are designed to promote respect for the rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining and comply with the legal requirements of the countries where we operate.

We empower and encourage our employees to share their concerns and communicate candidly with us through various channels, including grievance mechanisms and avenues for effective two-way dialogue with leadership. These various channels and processes enable us to review and address suggestions, concerns, and grievances.

Beyond our own employees, we expect our suppliers to provide their workers access to effective grievance mechanisms in our supply chain. We work with our suppliers to help them develop these mechanisms and to support the resolution of issues that are reported.