American is committed to respecting human rights, including combating illegal human trafficking and child exploitation. As a major global airline and a prominent part of the worldwide travel industry, we conduct our business with a focus on protecting human rights and the rights of children within our sphere of influence. We have adopted responsible workplace practices and endeavour to conduct our business operations free from complicity in human rights abuses.
Our commitment to human rights is outlined in our Standards of Business Conduct and Human Rights Statement, which require American’s team members to uphold the human rights of all persons, including permanent and temporary team members both domestically and internationally. American’s policies and other information on human trafficking and modern slavery, including links to educational and training resources, are available to all team members on the company’s intranet site.
Through training, American empowers our team members to recognize the signs of human trafficking and act if they suspect human trafficking. We have mandatory human trafficking awareness training for our frontline, customer-facing team members, including flight attendants, pilots and airport customer service representatives, as well as for team members with international purchasing responsibilities. This training is required for new employees and is part of our recurrent training programs. All told, we train over 70,000 team members each year.
Collaboration with government agencies, industry partners, and non-government organizations is another key facet of our human trafficking prevention program. American is proud to be involved with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Campaign, a national public awareness campaign designed to educate the public, law enforcement and other industry partners to identify the indicators of human trafficking and respond appropriately to possible cases.
In January 2018, American signed ECPAT-USA’s Tourism Child-Protection Code of Conduct, a voluntary set of business principles to prevent child sex tourism and trafficking of children. And in 2021, American joined the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative. Among the UN Global Compact principles, members pledge to uphold the elimination of all forms of forced and compulsory labor and the effective abolition of child labor.
Recognizing our responsibilities as one of the largest employers in Texas, we joined Texas Businesses Against Trafficking (TBAT), a business partnership established by the Office of the Texas Secretary of State aimed at combating human trafficking by fostering collaboration between the public and private sectors in Texas. We also joined forces with New Friends New Life (NFNL), a Texas-based organization working to restore and empower formerly trafficked teenage girls and sexually exploited women and their children. For its efforts, American was selected as a 2021 ProtectHER Award recipient by NFNL.
