27 millions of people are working in situations of forced labour worldwide.
The recent geopolitical and economic context, including the pandemic-led transformation of value chains and working conditions, have exacerbated labour abuse in many parts of the world.
These issues have been externalised for a long time and are now extremely complex to apprehend and tackle for companies that now want to be part of the solutions.
The Financial Times stresses in their article So you think you know your supply chain? a few key points and possible solutions to this situation:
- Good data is critical and hard to come by, but cannot tackle labour abuse issues alone.
- Suppliers need to be included in the decision making processes of companies, so that workers and communities have a say along with companies' management.
- Training is key to deliver new skills and reduce labour abuse, but brands often share suppliers and need coordination to set up efficient programmes without duplicating the same initiatives in the same facilities.
- Brands need to work along with local communities to tackle labour issues efficiently, which sometimes means building local capacity on their own rather than stretching their value chains with new vendors.
- Local capacity can take various shapes, from facilitating law enforcement to building schools or factories, even though none of them is the specialty of the company managing the initiative to begin with.
As regulators now make their voices heard along with NGO and activists, the pressure put on major company forces labour issues at the top of their priority lists.