Employee Health

Within the Indian Food Industry, employees spend approximately a third of their day at work, with long or irregular working hours, unpredictable shifts alongside frequent travel and as a result they often adopt unhealthy food habits, sedentary lifestyles or show signs of work stress. The National Health Policy 2017 of India, emphasises “preventive and promotive health care” (i.e., helping people to increase control over and improve their health), to reduce stress and improve safety at work since the workplace offers an ideal setting to promote employee health.

Initiatives such as the Ethical Tea Partnership with partners like the Sustainable Trade Initiative (IDH), UNICEF and Hindustan Unilever (HUL) have set common goals for tea estate workers in Assam state in North-Eastern India (famous for its tea) that include:

• Workers, their families and communities have increased access to high-quality healthcare.
• Tea estate workers, their families and communities have access to food that meets their nutritional needs.
• Female workers have better access to equal employment opportunities and maternity benefits that protect the health and development of themselves and their children, enabling them to achieve a decent standard of living.
• Lactating women are better able to breastfeed in safe spaces without being penalised for taking time out of the working day

Indian Maternity Policies

Under the Indian Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act 2017, maternity leave was raised from the previous 12 weeks to the current duration of 26 weeks. Prenatal leave was also extended from six to eight weeks.

A woman with two or more children is entitled to 12 weeks’ maternity leave and the prenatal leave in this case remains at six weeks. The Act further requires an employer to inform a woman worker of her rights under the Act at the time of her appointment. The information must be given in writing and in an electronic form to ensure that the rights of the employee are clearly presented to them.
The current Indian regulations on maternity leave are comprehensive when compared to other countries. For example, the US does not offer national statutory paid maternity, paternity or parental leave. The US Family and Medical Leave Act enables some employees to take up to 12 weeks unpaid maternity leave but only 60% of workers are eligible.

Consumer Health

Nutrition literacy within the Indian context is currently underdeveloped. The National Nutrition Strategy (NNS) of India follows the rationale that investing in nutrition is globally well recognized as a critical development stage and it is crucial for the fulfillment of human rights — especially for the most vulnerable children, girls, and women. Nutrition literacy constitutes the foundation for human development by reducing susceptibility to infection and related morbidity, disability and mortality and enhancing productivity. Nutrition is acknowledged as one of the most effective entry points for human development, poverty reduction and economic development, with high economic returns. High levels of maternal and child undernutrition in India have persisted, despite strong constitutional and legislative commitments by government.

• Indian companies must work to ensure the health and safety of their employees during the COVID-19 crisis. As demands for products and services have not diminished during the current outbreak, many companies have had to continue to operate at normal levels, which means that employees need sufficient protection to enable them to do their jobs without being put at risk. Following national and international guidelines is key. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India FSSAI has issued guidance in three areas: i) maintaining high levels of personal hygiene, ii) practicing social distancing, and; iii) cleaning and sanitation (FSSAI, 2020). More detail is set out within the referenced FSSAI document.
• Companies need to adopt COVID-19 strategies to mitigate employee risk in addition to job loss prevention within the company and in the value chain. This at minimum would mean ensuring that employees are compensated appropriately for their work and suppliers for their services, and that support to breastfeeding mothers is protected. An illustration of an appropriate approach in action would be Nestlé India’s policy in which the company has adopted stringent social distancing measures within its production facilities. It has also rolled out a program that will reward each operator for working during a stipulated period.

• Adopting or extending breastfeeding policies for their workers is another way companies can respond to COVID-19 (WHO, 2020). UNICEF has provided a ‘Breastfeeding During COVID’ document which provides guidelines on preventing breastfeeding disruption, in addition to necessary precautions and considerations that must be taken before, during, and after the crisis (UNICEF, 2020). Improving facilities to support breastfeeding mothers would be one way in which companies can help protect the health mothers and their infants.

The India Spotlight Index 2020 research did not include indicators to score and rank companies’ responses to the COVID-19. But ATNI did talk to companies about their initial coping strategies and responses to the pandemic between March and June 2020 and ATNI has been tracking publicly available information on industry’s response globally to the COVID-19 crisis, including in India, and reported on trends, best practices and areas of concern in separate reports. Read more about how companies can positively contribute to addressing the global nutrition challenges in ATNI’s COVID-19 Project.

• Most companies (twelve out of sixteen) make a commitment to improve the health and wellness of their employees with programs designed to address physical health and nutrition. While most of these programs (ten out of twelve) are accessible to all employees, only six companies demonstrated a commitment to improving the health and wellness of groups across the wider food supply chain and not direct employees. In addition, most companies do not seem to monitor the impact of their health and wellness programs. Hindustan Unilever bucks this trend by conducting independent evaluations to capture this information and goes a step further by monitoring the impact of programs relevant to employees across the food supply chain.
• In respect to increasing nutrition literacy, nutrition education, healthy diet-oriented and active lifestyle programs aimed at groups that experience, or are at high risk of experiencing, malnutrition, eight companies publicly commit to sponsor/fund such programs. Mondelēz India is the only company to demonstrate that all of its nutrition and health programs exclude product promotion or branding.

• Seven of the companies have a public commitment to support breastfeeding mothers with appropriate working conditions and facilities beyond legal requirements. Half of the overall companies provide at least some facilities to support working mothers. This support is though access to private rooms, flexible work hours etc., without a formal commitment to doing so (support is on an ad hoc basis).
• Three of the sixteen companies make formal commitments to supporting breastfeeding mothers at work. Coca-Cola India, Hindustan Unilever and Nestlé India have set out their commitment in a formal policy.
• Companies without formal commitments refer to less defined “other functional arrangements’’ to support breastfeeding mothers. Examples of these functional arrangements can be travel subsidies, creche access or alteration of workload.

HUL Health & Wellness Strategy

The Hindustan Unilever’s Health & Wellbeing strategy has been enhanced since 2016 and forms the cornerstone of the company’s approach to supporting healthier diets and lifestyles for its customers, employees and throughout the wider value chain. Through the program, the company has worked to double the amount of products that meet their ‘highest nutritional standards’ (reducing salt, sugar and fat). Support throughout the wider value chain is provided by programs such as ‘Seeds of Prosperity’, which aims to improve the dietary diversity of smallholder farmers and also improve their hygiene facilities. The Hindustan Unilever Lamplighter Program helps employees to improve their diet/nutritional intake and lifestyles for improved health. Other facets aim to change habits by measuring the direct impacts of calorie intake and water intake, for example, in addition to measuring other impacts like employees’ body mass index and blood pressure.

KMF Nandini’s employee support approach

KMF Nandini focuses on the nutrition of all employees by distributing up to 1 L per day of free milk to all employees. It also helps employees to get periodic health checks and cardiologist consultations through its annual medical camps.

PepsiCo India’s 2025 Agenda

The employee element of PepsiCo India’s 2025 Agenda is designed to drive fair and safe working conditions throughout the value chain and address the most salient human rights issues (i.e., freedom of association, human right to water, land rights, vulnerable worker groups, working hours and wages, and workplace safety). PepsiCo India offers policies like 12 weeks of paternity leave, childcare policy, MatCare4U Program (which regularly sends women information on maternity issues), in addition to a multitude of flexible options to accommodate the needs of breastfeeding mothers at work. PepsiCo India also has the ambitious intention to extend the principles of the Supplier Code of Conduct to all franchises and joint ventures by 2025. The Code of Conduct is a 16-point document to ensure that those in the PepsiCo India supply chain uphold the company’s expectations in areas of labor practices, health and safety.