Health and Safety
At NIKE, Inc., we believe working in a safe and healthy work environment is a fundamental human right.
In line with the International Labour Organization (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, we strive to provide workplaces that uphold that right throughout our operations. As part of a responsible supply chain, we expect suppliers to advance similar workplace standards for those who make and move our products.
Our approach to occupational health and safety is grounded in internationally recognized management system principles from the ILO and other leading health and safety principles that support strong governance, worker engagement, risk management, continuous improvement and a culture of safety.
In 2018, NIKE, Inc. launched its Culture of Safety program to help suppliers move beyond compliance and strengthen health and safety management systems. Through early pilots, we found that strong leadership accountability, worker engagement, and a positive safety culture can drive meaningful improvements in workplace safety. These insights continue to shape how we support suppliers today.
Building on the success of the pilot, we continued to scale and refine the program, supporting suppliers in creating resilient management systems and workplace cultures that empower workers, strengthen leadership accountability and drive continuous improvement in health and safety performance. By the end of FY25, we had scaled the Culture of Safety program to 106 Tier 1 factories, covering more than 650,000 workers.
Today, we continue referencing that methodology to quantify the value we create.
We are working with suppliers to help them create world-class healthy and safe workplaces. Through our programs, we teach them important skills and then measure the maturity of their safety culture. By encouraging suppliers to build a facility culture focused on safety, we can help create a more resilient workforce where everyone is accountable for reducing health and safety incidents and driving impact.
We place a strong emphasis on leadership accountability and governance to help suppliers drive action from the top. We are investing in, and delivering, targeted systems, trainings and initiatives that guide our suppliers and their workers toward a stronger and more risk-resilient health and safety culture. We support suppliers in developing industry-leading health and safety management systems through three key areas: Leadership and Governance, Systems and Processes and Developing Workers.
Effective leaders set the tone. That is why we encourage leaders at the factory group level to hold themselves accountable for facility-wide safety performance and driving safe behaviors, while motivating their colleagues to do the same.
Our efforts are supported by a Transformational Leadership Program which supports suppliers in evaluating the effectiveness of their corporate safety governance structures. Administered by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), the Transformational Leadership Program is delivered to enterprise-level business leaders to help them understand their health and safety obligations. By the end of FY25, a total of 14 of our largest supplier groups representing 73 facilities completed the program. These 73 facilities represent more than 61 percent of NIKE, Inc. overall manufacturing production volume.
As part of a robust occupational health and safety program, we encourage suppliers to implement industry-leading systems and processes to reduce worker risk.
We are a member of the Life and Building Safety (LABS) initiative, an industry-driven program that brings brands, retailers and public organizations together to mitigate preventable fire, electrical and structural safety risks in countries that produce apparel, footwear, accessories and home textiles.
Through our Workplace Safety Facilitator (WSF) program, we started by helping workers engage with their peers to encourage collective understanding of what behaviors drive fire and building safety. As a part of this program, we have trained 16,113 personnel from strategic finished good suppliers* on the skills needed to facilitate meaningful safety conversations and coaching sessions with colleagues. By the end of FY25, these 16,113 active WSFs had trained nearly 680,000 workers. Building on the skills learned through the WSF program, participants have now expanded the program to include fall protection, chemical management, machine safety, women’s health, and mental health.
We also use recognized principles of occupational health and hygiene (anticipate, recognize, evaluate and control) to identify, assess and mitigate chronic illnesses and disease in the workplace. We want to empower suppliers to use these four principles in the workplace, including when new materials or manufacturing processes are introduced. Over 400 facility-based health and safety professionals have completed our Fundamentals of Industrial Hygiene training course. In FY25, we introduced more advanced industrial hygiene courses and provided additional training for high-risk suppliers. Additionally, we have developed NIKE, Inc.’s Industrial Hygiene Playbook to further guide suppliers on how to prevent chronic illnesses and disease.
*Strategic suppliers: strategic finished goods suppliers; suppliers representing approximately 80 percent of total footwear and apparel production.
Guided by the principles of the IOSH Competency Framework Program (CFP), we are focusing on helping suppliers develop key skills and behaviors within their workforce across technical, core and behavioral safety domains to drive sustainable improvements. We delivered the IOSH competency framework through the Transformational Leadership Program to 37 participants representing 17 strategic suppliers, representing more than 60 percent of NIKE, Inc. manufacturing volume, to drive greater understanding of their current technical, behavioral and core competencies in health and safety.
We measure progress and supplier safety maturity through the NIKE, Inc. “Culture of Safety Maturity Assessment” (CoSMA) tool and validate it through a third-party administered Safety Perception Survey that gathers worker feedback. Recognizing that this is an ongoing endeavor, we encourage suppliers to pursue improvements through continuous self-assessment and worker validation.
The CoSMA tool allows the supplier and NIKE, Inc. to measure progress as suppliers move up maturity levels, which were based off of Professor Patrick Hudson’s “Safety Culture Ladder.” This framework, which helps explore how workplaces evolve from unsafe to safe, was adapted to reflect NIKE, Inc.’s specific requirements. The tool uses a five-level maturity framework to assess the integration of health and safety into workplace culture and management systems. Our FY25 goal was for all strategic suppliers to achieve Level 3, a milestone that reflects strong compliance with NIKE, Inc. standards and the implementation of health and safety management systems. In FY25, 100 percent of strategic suppliers met NIKE, Inc.'s requirement for building healthy and safe workplaces by reaching level 3 demonstrating progress toward embedding health and safety into day-to-day operations and decision-making across the supply chain.
Our capability building and cultural maturity programs, as well as the heightened level of engagement, we’ve achieved through the CoSMA tool, are the culmination of years of dedicated work to drive strong supplier health and safety performance. As we continue to progress, we are also working to benchmark our work against other organizations with world-class safety programs. That is why, during FY23, we engaged the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), a leading voice in health and safety, to assess factory performance.
The RoSPA evaluation is a globally recognized benchmarking process across all sectors. NIKE, Inc. suppliers are evaluated within the manufacturing sector. As a part of the evaluation process, facilities submit information on health and safety leadership, management systems, programs. In FY25, 92 factories submitted applications; of those, 78 achieved a gold assessment, which is the highest possible grade. An additional 14 facilities received silver. One factory in our supply chain received the Highly Commended Award in the Manufacturing Sector, one of the most competitive and prestigious distinctions within the RoSPA Awards program. Gold ratings from the RoSPA benchmark help NIKE, Inc. evaluate suppliers’ ability to manage their safety and health programs at a world class level.