People

Doing Right by Our People

For one hundred thirty years, our brands have built a reputation for humility, respect and a commitment to doing the right thing. As Kontoor Brands, we are dedicated to creating quality apparel that is woven with care, style, and sensitivity to the people who help make our products.

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Talent & Culture

Fostering a workplace where everyone feels they belong is a core principle at Kontoor Brands. From attracting key talent to our iconic brand displays in the marketplace and communities, we take great pride in fostering a culture that delivers on our purpose to inspire confidence everyday. We believe market-leading solutions and high-performing teams are developed by ensuring a wide range of perspectives, backgrounds, skills, and abilities participating in free expression of ideas.

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In Our Supply Chain

The health, safety and well-being of people who work with us is a top priority. This includes the workers in our owned and leased facilities and those that work across our supply chain.

Learn more about our Health & Safety Program in our 2024 Sustainability Progress Report.

Safe Working Conditions

Kontoor believes that all workers should not fear for their safety and have the right to a safe and healthy work environment. This involves preventing hazards, including fires, building collapses, or exposure to harmful substances. Our Critical Life Safety Program (CLS) ensures that life safety measures are in place in supplier facilities, focusing on fire safety, electrical safety, and structural safety. We assess suppliers through the CLS program, and they must remediate any issues identified.

Our CLS program has been gradually rolled out, with different schedules for APAC, EMEA, and Western Hemisphere countries. Factories develop corrective action plans based CLS assessment reports conducted by qualified third-party audit firms, and we monitor progress until all actions are adequately addressed. Non-compliance can lead to termination of our business relationship. This approach promotes safer working environments throughout our supply chain.

Human Rights

Doing the right thing for people means acting in alignment with Kontoor’s values across both our own operations and the supply chain. Our ethos insists on fairness, dignity, and respect for everyone involved in our products' creation. Our Global Compliance Principles, reflecting UN and ILO standards, are mandatory for our suppliers. We monitor these areas through regular social compliance audits. If national law conflicts with international human rights standards, we adhere to the higher standard or uphold international rights as much as possible within national law. We provide training to workers and factory management with a focus on prevention, and at the same time elevating human rights through a better understanding and implementation of our policies, guidelines, and compliance requirements. We also have an Ethics Helpline for reporting potential rights violations, which are promptly investigated.

Our human rights due diligence is ongoing, especially during new partnerships or operational changes. We manage risks through checks, acting on findings, tracking actions, and communicating with stakeholders about our impacts. We use our influence to drive improvement.

Worker Well-Being

Our goal is to work only with supplier factories that support worker well-being by 2025. Worker well-being programs must support a multi-dimensional commitment by suppliers, covering at least two of our seven defined dimensions: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional/Mental, Social, Environmental, Financial, or DEI. Additionally, the program must be a partnership initiative with Kontoor, and be developed alongside Kontoor who will provide regular advisory services and know-how e.g., Kontoor sharing data on the factory’s WWB specific needs, and Kontoor providing ideas for activities and sharing ways in which to duplicate or scale cases of best practice.

Learn more about our global sustainability goals.

Learn More About Kontoor’s Sustainability Program

Goals

In 2020, we announced our first global sustainability goals to address the environmental and social impact of our operations, supply chain, products, and people.

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Stakeholder Engagement

We recognize we cannot address major environmental, social, or economic challenges alone, so we collaborate with experts who share our commitment.

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Product

We strive to use responsibly sustainable suppliers, materials and operations for each of the millions of products we produce each year.

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Planet

Our longstanding commitment to environmental stewardship and compliance unites with a vision of a more sustainable world.

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