The  B Lab Standards V2 introduce three closely connected social Impact Topics that shape how companies treat people:

• Human Rights (HR)

• Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (JEDI)

• Fair Work (FW)

They are distinct, but deliberately designed to work together as one cohesive system. Conceptually, the three topics could certainly be merged; however, we feel that presenting them separately makes the overall approach clearer and easier to digest.

The role of each Impact Topic

Fair Work: Good jobs and positive workplace culture 

The Fair Work Impact Topic is focused on people working in your company’s operations. It requires companies to: 

• Set clear expectations for employees (for example, written contracts, and fair rules around shift work).

• Implement fair wage practices, such as wage scales, gender wage gap analysis, living wage, and collective bargaining.

• Consider worker feedback on decisions that affect them.

• Measure and improve workplace culture on an ongoing basis.

This leads to good quality jobs and positive workplace cultures.

Fair Work Impact Topic is explicitly about the company’s own operations – what happens to people working inside your organisation. Standards about fair work in supply chains are covered under the Human Rights Impact Topic. 

JEDI: The equity and inclusion lens across your people and value chain

The Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (JEDI) Impact Topic guides companies to actively advance JEDI principles within their workplaces and value chains, and address systemic inequities that disadvantage certain groups. JEDI requires companies to:

• Collect data to understand how experiences and outcomes differ between groups (for example, hiring, promotion, or retention patterns by gender identity or another social identity).

• Use this information to select targeted actions from a flexible “menu of options” (foundation, workplace, and beyond‑the‑workplace actions), with expectations that increase by company size.

Human Rights: Preventing harm in operations and value chains

The Human Rights Impact Topic asks companies to understand how their operations and value chains may involve negative human rights impacts, and take action to prevent and mitigate them. This topic aligns B Corp Certification with the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights. 

Put simply:

• Fair Work defines what good work and a positive culture look like in your company.

• JEDI ensures that those jobs and cultures are experienced equitably by different groups and brings an equity lens into your value chain.

• Human Rights ensures your company does not harm people’s rights in your operations and value chains, and that you have robust systems to identify, address, and report on risks and impacts.

Where the requirements reinforce one another in practice

Beyond this high‑level picture, the most useful connections between these topics are the way that action in one area helps you meet expectations in the others. The links below focus on practical implementation: how concrete steps on data, worker voice, and equity can support compliance (and impact) across Fair Work, JEDI, and Human Rights. 

1. Data and disaggregation: using JEDI tools to strengthen Fair Work and Human Rights

JEDI requires companies to collect and analyse data on workers’ experiences and conditions, and to compare outcomes between different groups (for example, by gender identity or other social identities). In practice, this includes looking at things like wages, perceptions of workplace culture, and patterns in complaints or grievances through a disaggregated lens.

For companies, this means for example: 

• When working on fair wages (FW2), it is not enough to focus on overall wage structures or a single gender wage gap number. Using JEDI‑style disaggregation, companies should examine who earns what across different social identities and use that insight to shape wage decisions and corrective actions. 

• When working on workplace culture (FW4), average scores or aggregate survey results are only a starting point. Disaggregating this data shows how different groups experience culture differently, and should directly inform the actions a company takes to improve inclusion, safety, and belonging.

In other words, investments in JEDI‑aligned data collection and analysis make Fair Work practices more targeted and effective.

2. Worker consideration and participation: one set of channels, multiple standards topics 

All three topics require that workers can speak up, be heard, and influence decisions that affect them. Fair Work highlights mechanisms such as unions, works councils, worker committees, meetings, focus groups, and surveys as ways to gather and act on worker feedback. JEDI also relies on discussions and surveys to understand how inclusion and equity are experienced in practice, and to inform JEDI priorities. Purpose & Stakeholder Governance focuses on grievance procedures, while Human Rights reinforces the need for accessible channels where affected stakeholders can raise concerns and seek remedies.

For companies, this creates a clear opportunity: 

• The same core channels (worker representation mechanisms, worker surveys, and grievance processes) can be designed and strengthened once, then leveraged to meet expectations across Fair Work, JEDI, and Human Rights.

• Improving these mechanisms (especially independent or collective worker representation and robust grievance and remediation processes) will simultaneously advance compliance and impact under multiple parts of the standards.

3. Equity and pay: Fair Work on wage practice, JEDI and Human Rights on broader equity impacts

Pay equity is a concrete example of how the topics divide responsibilities while reinforcing each other. 

Fair Work focuses on wage practices themselves – for example, wage structures and scales, analysis and transparency around pay gaps, and specific actions for the lowest‑paid workers. JEDI then pushes companies to ask who benefits from those wage practices, across different social identities, and to address non‑wage aspects of equity such as representation, access to opportunities, and non‑discrimination. Disaggregated wage and workforce data that is collected for JEDI purposes can feed directly into Fair Work pay analyses and decisions. Human Rights connects to both where pay and working conditions create or contribute to rights risks, such as exploitative or abusive conditions in operations or the value chain. 

Issues like gender‑based discrimination can therefore appear simultaneously as:

• A JEDI concern (for example, unequal access to roles, progression, or safe and inclusive workplaces).

• A Fair Work concern (for example, gender pay gaps, unequal career progression, harassment, or unsafe conditions).

• A salient Human Rights issues (for example, where discriminatory or inequitable pay and conditions lead to economic exclusion, exploitation, or abuse).

Taken together, this means that work to strengthen equitable wage structures and transparency under Fair Work, disaggregated equity analysis and action under JEDI, and robust safeguards and remedy under Human Rights will often be addressing the same underlying issues – and progress in one area can significantly advance the others.