Forced Labour Evidence Briefs | April 2021
Due Diligence
and Transparency
Legislation
Governments and business are beginning to adopt human rights due diligence as a tool to combat forced labour in global supply chains. While this is potentially good news for workers facing exploitation, there is a danger that new due diligence legislation and practices will replicate the well-documented flaws of transparency legislation and reporting, reduced to yet another tick box exercise. This brief sets out the key requirements for strong and effective human rights due diligence legislation and practices to address the business drivers of forced labour along the supply chain.
We explain how governments can use mandatory human rights due diligence as a key tool, accompanied by broader legal reforms, to spur wide ranging changes to business practices along end-to-end supply chains. We provide key criteria for strong human rights due diligence in practice and explain how companies can implement effective due diligence programs that are sensitive to racial and gender inequality. We stress that implementing effective human rights due diligence is not just about understanding and mapping forced labour risks, which has been the focus of efforts to date, but rather is about action to address its root causes in supply chains.
Forced Labour Evidence Briefs | July 2021
Commercial
Contracts and
Sourcing
Irresponsible purchasing practices – such as sourcing beneath the costs of production and the failure to incorporate considerations around wages into commercial contracts – are key drivers of forced labour in global supply chains. This brief outlines how contracts and sourcing practices, as well as the legal regimes surrounding them, could change to promote equitable labour practices and protect supply chain workers from exploitation.
We provide an overview of sourcing tools and agreements that promote decent work, including living wage benchmarks, ringfenced labour costs and binding worker-driven social responsibility agreements. Stressing that commercial and contract law are often the main vehicle through which governments implement and enforce duties on corporations, including due diligence and transparency, we explain the far-reaching reforms that need to take place to enable workers to hold businesses accountable for the terms and conditions within their contracts and enable workers to enforce them.
Forced Labour Evidence Briefs | December 2021
Labour Share and
Value Distribution
If forced labour is ever to be eliminated from the global economy, the redistribution of value in supply chain is essential. As it stands, the resulting profits from production are amassing among powerful brands, retailers, and investors, and the least powerful actors in supply chains – predominantly workers – are left to scramble for an increasingly small piece of the pie. This brief explores the key underlying factors that have driven inequitable value distribution – notably increasing monopolisation and the rise of the “superstar” firm, the financialisation of the global economy, and a declining labour share.
It explains how unequal value distribution leaves workers vulnerable to severe labour exploitation and highlights tried-and-tested solutions from specific industries and geographies. These include: the direct redistribution of value through wage benchmarking that targets a living wage, thus reducing the vulnerabilities to exploitation workers often face; worker-driven social responsibility programs; general support for labour organizing (and notably the removal of legislative and practical barriers); the strengthening of anti-trust measures; and, more broadly, a reorientation of the corporate focus toward all stakeholders.
Forced Labour Evidence Briefs | November 2021
Investment Patterns and Leverage
Recently, investors have joined the ranks of stakeholders championing the need for a more humane form of capitalism, highlighting their key role at the “top” of supply chains and the significant influence they wield among business actors. There is growing momentum around ESG investing – a focus not only on financial gain, but also the environmental, social, and governance impacts of doing business. Yet, there is no agreed-upon, established set of standards to guide this process, and social issues are consistently de-prioritized over environmental ones in company disclosures.
This brief investigates how investment patterns can be leveraged to combat forced labour, putting social considerations and labour standards front and centre. We examine how changing patterns of investment – including the financialisation of the global economy and concentration of corporate ownership – are creating structural constraints on labour costs and driving the use of forced labour, often via outsourcing and subcontracting, in ways that undermine companies’ own anti-trafficking commitments. We lay out a series of recommendations to correct these trends and identify meaningful action investors could take to promote decent work.
Forced Labour Evidence Briefs | December 2021
Worker Debt
and Inequality
As researchers have chronicled for over two decades now, supply chain workers are routinely paid at or below the minimum wage, oftentimes owing to noncompliance such as wage theft, fraudulent deductions, and predatory fees, as well as laws that exclude certain classes of workers from wage standards. Low wages means that workers often need to go into debt to secure the basic necessities of life, and worker debt has become a critical, consistent element of business models configured around forced labour and human trafficking implemented by both producers and labour market intermediaries.
The broader politics of debt, including national debt shaped by histories of colonial dispossession and enslavement, corporations’ strategic use of debt to reduce tax burdens, and taxpayer debts to bailout corporations amidst crises, further complicate the power relations and prospects for addressing debt bondage in supply chains. This brief explores solutions, including: alternative forms of corporate accountability mechanisms; government and value redistribution policies; reparations for historical injustice; debt relief; and business model innovation.
Forced Labour Evidence Briefs | July 2022
Social Auditing and Ethical Certification
Research has documented persistent problems in the effectiveness of social auditing and ethical certification schemes when it comes to detecting, addressing, and preventing forced labour. Yet, companies continue to turn to these private tools to fulfil their duties under due diligence and transparency legislation, and as strategies to respond to pressure to address forced labour and shield themselves from liability when it does occur. While there is growing acknowledgement of the social compliance regime’s flaws, there has been less attention to how these could be addressed.
With that in mind, this brief explores: How can social auditing and certification be adequately regulated or reformed to play a role in eradicating forced labour? What is the potential to reinvest the cost of creating and operating these mechanisms into more effective, worker-driven solutions? Tackling these questions, we map out how monitoring tools would need to change to play a meaningful role in promoting labour standards. We stress the need to establish liability for auditors and certifiers that play a role in misleading consumers and policymakers about labour practices and worksite conditions, including for the accuracy of their reports and the role they play in covering up criminal practices. At the same time, we argue that funds spent on auditing and certification should be channelled into more effective worker-driven and state-led solutions.
Forced Labour Evidence Briefs | December 2021
Re:Structure Lab Blueprint
Given widespread and high-level commitment to ending modern slavery among governments, civil society, and business and investment leaders, we will offer this Blueprint to guide key stakeholder groups in implementing the necessary reforms. The Blueprint illustrates the interlocking nature of the themes addressed in our six Forced Labour Evidence Briefs and situates them within the possibility for structural change created by the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing recovery process. This includes an overview of the Lab’s understanding of how existing business models drive labour exploitation and how they must be altered to ensure a sustainable future, guidance on how to achieve high-level commitments made by the business community, and a scaffolding on which to build the more just, equitable future we all want to see.
Drawing out cross-cutting themes from the Lab’s work to date, the Blueprint offers a vision—and guidance on how to achieve it—for a more socially and environmentally sustainable future.