Multinationals cannot operate their far-flung employment operations as “silos” anymore. Business and legal imperatives from Sarbanes Oxley, Dodd-Frank and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to the new UK bribery law to working conditions in China and beyond push multinational headquarters to impose compliance standards and rules on employees worldwide.  This is why most major multinationals, particularly those based in the United States, have issued tough global codes that spell out the rules for their worldwide operations.

B ut how to draft and then implement a global code of conduct is more involved than it may at first appear.  Understanding what a "code of conduct" should and should not do can be a challenge, as the very concept of a "code of conduct" varies by industry, company, and specific employer needs. On the broadest level, in the international employment context there are two very different types of "code of conduct": External supplier codes that chiefly protect employees working for a multinational’s suppliers from so-called “sweatshop” conditions (these have come under scrutiny lately in the context of Apple and Foxconn in China) and internal ethics codes that chiefly impose compliance rules on a multinational’s own employees across its worldwide workforces.  In a sense, these two global codes of conduct are actually opposites: External supplier codes seek to protect employees not on the code issuer’s payroll while internal ethics codes seek to restrict (impose rules on) a code issuer’s own employees.

This webinar offers a toolkit for drafting and implementing a global corporate code of conduct.  After distinguishing external supplier codes of conduct from internal ethics codes of conduct, the session breaks the issues into two parts:

• a checklist of topics that an internal ethics code of conduct might address, focusing on the difficult provisions that raise problems in the cross-border context.
• how to legally implement a global code of conduct across multiple jurisdictions, tackling issues such as: aligning the code with local work rules; imposing local subsidiary mandates; doing mandatory translations, consulting with worker representatives, and collecting employee acknowledgements.

Donald C. Dowling, Jr., a White & Case partner and the Firm’s International Employment Counsel