How can we eradicate modern slavery? Part two

With Ryan Lynch, Practice Director for Sustainability at BSI, and Helen Carter, Lead Consultant at Action Sustainability

Matthew Chiles: In this second part of the episode we explore in a bit more detail some of the issues around supply chain complexity, forced labor and other forms of modern slavery raised by Fred. I do this with Ryan Lynch, Practice Director for Sustainability at BSI, who like Fred is also based in the United States. He leads a team advancing decarbonization, climate action and sustainable supply chains.

I also speak with Helen Carter who is Lead Consultant at Action Sustainability, and also a member of the BSI Standards Committee which has developed BS 25700 on Modern Slavery Guidance.

I spoke to Ryan and Helen about the challenges of creating supply chain transparency; how organizations should engage their suppliers, contractors and subcontractors to eradicate modern slavery; the positive role of technology and digitalization to address this issue; and also about the role of government policies, legislation and standards.

First up I asked Helen: how do organizations know if their supply chains are free from human rights violations?

Helen Carter: This question is interesting because it's going to be an unpopular one and slightly controversial in terms of the fact that… you can’t. No organization will ever be able to stand up and say, hand on heart, that they have got zero potential victims of modern slavery, exploitation, or interconnected human rights issues in their supply chains. 

Due to the complexity, the sheer size of organizations we've seen in recent times, and challenges of the likes of COVID-19 and Russian sanctions, it takes a really long time to understand what's happening within those organizations and drive this.

There's an element here of organizations needing to understand they need to change the story a little bit. And whilst they might have modern slavery statements to look at saying they want to eradicate or contribute towards eradicating, things like modern slavery and associated human rights violations – what we're actually looking for is organizations to find and fix, or look and address, the challenges that they find.

“We know that some businesses will move a supply chain very quickly. They'll move to different countries or to different suppliers. Some organizations I deal with have tens of thousands of suppliers and they might find that there's one supplier they didn't know they had that demonstrates these issues. 

So I think it's really important that we get businesses to start thinking about moving away from this need to say that they have no victims of slavery, to declaring that they have a process for looking for and addressing it.”

Individual listeners can go and have a look at what they buy. There's a really great website called slaveryfootprint.org where you can put your own personal consumption in. 

What we're looking for businesses to do is take a different approach: take responsibility for their supply chains, understand their impact and address those impacts as they identify them. So it feels like it's starting with a negative in terms of, you can't, but it’s more about adjusting people's expectations.

Matthew Chiles: Which sort of industries are most at risk of this issue of modern slavery and why do you think they are? 

Ryan Lynch: Well in some cases it's going to depend on the context. So you can look at different factors in the operating environment. Where are they operating? What's the local legal regime? What's the local enforcement regime? Where are there historical incidents of these types of risks surfacing? It's best for companies to look at this from a country level: where do I operate and where do these risks surface? 

One of the tools that we bring to our work is a risk intelligence platform called screen, which analyzes country risks. 

Another impact area is commodities. Commodities associated with a less formal workforce, or that are further upstream in the supply chain, like mining and agriculture, are typically higher risk. That's the third factor or tier of the supply chain.

So, how do you choose your own suppliers and how do you maintain your own level of visibility and control in that? 

There are some great resources to support this process. I mentioned Screen, but the U.S. Department of Labor also has a list of goods that are made with forced or child labour. The U.S. State Department also has the trafficking in persons report.

The hard part is actually applying that to your business and making decisions based on the information that's available. 

Matthew Chiles: How about you, Helen? Do you think there are any particular industries that are most at risk of modern slavery?

Helen Carter: There is a sort of ‘starter cheat sheet’ that tends to come out quite a lot. Echoing Ryan's comments that the commodity sector is a big one, particularly in areas where there are extractives – I do a lot of work in construction which is notorious for these challenges. 

We see it not just in direct but also indirect labour on construction sites. So obviously we're looking very closely at Qatar and The FIFA World Cup, and embedded in a lot of products – such as bricks, categorized as ‘blood bricks’, for example. 

“I think what's interesting in this space is this dynamic of systems versus getting closer to the people in your supply chain. When you are trying to understand the risks, one of the things that I see with a lot of organizations is that they get very procedural, very systematic, and forget that the people are at the heart of what they are trying to address. So vulnerability is really, really important in this stage.”

Understanding whether something is low-paid or low-skilled, to add on to Ryan's comments, the intersectional aspects of discrimination, poor employment standards, or abuse that might be going on in some supply chains which we see in things like garment sectors and food sectors. 

It's really important that when an organization thinks about those risks, they don't just consider the risk to their business. Because if we think of commodities, for example, the reputational risk is virtually zero. Nobody knows whether a brick is from South Asia or a valley in Wales, so the reputational risk is really, really small. But the risk to people working in the supply chain could be significant due to the vulnerability issues. 

That sort of visibility should also be considering geography and legislation. People tend to think, “oh, Europe's fine” or “the UK's fine, we've got legislation, it’s not a problem”. But we know that in all those regions that we consider to be developed, there are cases of modern slavery permeating through businesses where you'd assume that legislation does not allow that to happen. 

Focusing on the industries, thinking about the risk of people, vulnerabilities and about what those vulnerabilities look like is a really important part of considering risk in this space.

Matthew Chiles: So Helen, what’s the biggest challenge to supply chain transparency, do you think? 

Helen Carter: I think for me, one of the biggest challenges is the lack of understanding in organizations about what the investment criteria is. I've spent a lot of time in my career in procurement, talking to procurement professionals and they're driven significantly by operational efficiency and cost savings.

As we've had COVID-19, Russia, Brexit and lots of other challenges that are hitting supply chains, you try and get a supply chain person to think about what's happening with a human rights lens and a modern slavery lens – it feels like a big mountain for them to climb.

Trying to embed it in business as usual within a supply chain management procurement process can be a big challenge. What I’ve found with some organizations that we've worked with, and some colleagues, is that when you start to get into the supply chain and its layers of where the business relationship is not so one-on-one or one-on-many, it's not so connected.

Whose responsibility is it to address these issues? When you find out what's going on in those supply chains, there's a lack of competence, knowledge, ambition, and possibly a lack of investment and resources for that remedy.

When we think about the fact that this week is COP27, for example, the environment world is easier. I don't say it's easy, but it's easier – more scientific, the cost-benefit makes sense, the investment profile makes sense. You get into human rights and modern slavery, and it's just deemed to be fluffy or challenging.

“Transparency is very costly and resource-heavy, without necessarily being able to put the business lens on what the return on investment is. Where brands have a reputational challenge, as we see in the garment industry, they do spend time because it has a massive impact on the brand and its reputation. 

However, some of the biggest human rights and modern slavery violations are in areas like extractors – mining, oil, gas, construction – where brand reputation doesn't exist. Actually, the business case for addressing these issues, which is the way businesses speak, is a much more difficult thing to explain.”

I think it's the lack of knowledge, lack of resources and maybe the lack of urgency in some sectors over others.

Matthew Chiles: Ryan, knowledge or lack of knowledge, resources, urgency… What's your perspective? 

Ryan Lynch: There are a lot of challenges and Helen spoke to the scale of the issue. If I'm a buyer at the end of the supply chain and I have a thousand suppliers, that's a lot. It's hard to be everywhere all the time. So there's the scale. 

There's the lack of direct control. If I've got ten of my own sites, I can make investments. I can hire HR professionals directly. I can make changes to policies and procedures. It's a bit easier than indirectly influencing those thousand suppliers. 

I think that cascades into the issue of skills development. Some of the skills here, they're all teachable, but it's challenging to teach and there's a lot of really critical thinking and empathy that's baked in, which is much harder to convey. So the depth of dialogue that's required and the substantive nature of how to engage suppliers, that in itself is hard to scale as well. I think just the nature of the risks are harder to measure. People are really complicated. They're more complicated than machines or materials, which are a lot more predictable. People have good days and bad days, and managing people in general or the dynamic between an employee and their manager is hard to define.

“There's also the nature of forced labor. People aren't in a workplace walking around with a sign saying “I am being forced to work”. The ways that people are exploited are hidden. 

In some cases, there are administrative controls that you don't see on the surface: contracts, retention of passports, even the subtle dynamic between an employer and an employee. There's a huge power difference there that people on the outside probably wouldn't recognize, the employer themself might not be conscious of it, but the employee is very, very aware of it.”

So those things could be exploited, and it's not something like greenhouse gasses, for example, that could be measured in the same way.

Helen Carter: I think one of the other challenges that we see is actually cultural in terms of what's acceptable and what's not in different countries. When we were putting the BS 25700 standard together, a simple “should it be called modern slavery” conversation erupted because modern slavery is a very UK-centric, maybe even European-centric standpoint.

A lot of organizations are starting to think about whether it is just forced labor or modern slavery. Is it now human rights? 

In some countries, we see huge atrocities happening in supply chains that are either being covered up or organizations are being complicit where certain things are culturally normalized. In employment standards, this is the way it's always been. Some countries have rules around passports that they apply and it's part of the legislation. 

So the dynamic here is around how we make real, effective change whilst understanding the cultural dynamics that might be embedded in our supply chain. And that’s really difficult. 

So those things could be exploited, and it's not something like greenhouse gasses, for example, that could be measured in the same way.

Helen Carter: I think one of the other challenges that we see is actually cultural in terms of what's acceptable and what's not in different countries. When we were putting the BS 25700 standard together, a simple “should it be called modern slavery” conversation erupted because modern slavery is a very UK-centric, maybe even European-centric standpoint.

A lot of organizations are starting to think about whether it is just forced labor or modern slavery. Is it now human rights? 

In some countries, we see huge atrocities happening in supply chains that are either being covered up or organizations are being complicit where certain things are culturally normalized. In employment standards, this is the way it's always been. Some countries have rules around passports that they apply and it's part of the legislation. 

So the dynamic here is around how we make real, effective change whilst understanding the cultural dynamics that might be embedded in our supply chain. And that’s really difficult. 

“Asking individuals to have empathy about this is not too difficult. Most people, when I do my training, come away horrified about what's happening. But the reality is that as you start to get into countries or regions where they don't recognize the terminology around modern slavery or forced labor, that becomes incredibly difficult to influence.”

Ryan Lynch: Well, I think one of the challenges that Helen's alluding to here, in addition to the scale and the lack of direct control, is around complexity. So if we're dealing with dozens or hundreds of components, materials in a product, and thousands of suppliers, it gets quite complex. 

So, now we're outside of the four walls of our direct business and we're in multiple countries around the world. And then when you get into issues related to foreign migrant workers who might be employed at the site – there's one more layer of obfuscation that makes it harder for someone to see behind.

If I'm working with a direct supplier and they're working with a recruiter who's recruited workers from another country, who may have also been recruited by someone in-country, now we've got that many more layers of points in the process where workers can be exposed to risk, exploited, or tricked into workplaces that they just can't get out of.

So again, that's not really on the surface, you really have to dig and be skilled at digging, and in many cases bring in people who can speak multiple languages, and understand the legal regimes behind them. 

Helen Carter: To add to that, there are different drivers for why this happens to a certain extent. When we're seeing some supply chains, it's not necessarily criminality, it's forced labor. It's bringing them in, bringing in cheap labor. 

If we bring in some of their areas, and particularly why the act was put in place in the UK, you have aspects of criminality involved in all of this. It's linked to trafficking, it's linked to exploitative practices. 

And one of the things that we've been learning a lot over the last few years as we've been working with businesses is how smart some of these criminals actually are.

When the Modern Slavery Act first came out, the good check was to check bank accounts. If you've got somebody working on your site, perhaps with the same bank account as four other people working there, today is an indicator. It's something that you can look for very quickly, but criminal enterprises soon realized this is something that’s monitored. 

So now each individual person is more likely to have ten bank accounts opened in their own name. As we educate businesses to let them know that these things are happening, they understand how to deal with that systematic piece.

You have to balance these hard measures, which are the systems, the checks and balances with the soft measures, which are talking to people so that you understand the drivers for why this exploitation is happening, so that you can really start to bring something useful and effective in trying to manage this issue.

Matthew Chiles: Up to this point, Ryan and Helen have described some of the industries at most risk to the issue of modern slavery and set out some of the challenges facing organizations in creating supply chain transparency and sustainability. Having considered those, let's move on to look at solutions.

But I suppose if we flip to a more positive perspective, how can we make significant advancements in the eradication of modern slavery? Let’s come to you first, Ryan. 

Ryan Lynch: I would like some of the dialogue to be directed towards inequality as well. In countries where there is a higher degree of inequality, there are associations with a whole host of negative human impacts – ranging from gun deaths, obesity deaths, teenage pregnancy etc.

This might be too abstract for this discussion, but I don't think there's enough talk about inequality and how it drives behaviour, whether it's individually, organizationally, or across relationships in a supply chain. I think, again, this is probably too abstract for any concrete advice to start tackling tomorrow, but there really needs to be new ways of accounting for value.

We’re sort of baked into a very short-term accounting system and this is; who needs to extract value, how we extract value and how returns are calculated and taxes are levied etc. All of that drives very near-term, siloed, shortsighted and short-minded approaches to things and the impact on the development of human beings to reach their full potential, above and beyond even just not exploiting them, those kind of get lost. 

So at a high level, again, probably too abstract to be concrete advice for a company today.

“There are large-scale ways that we do things that are broken at their DNA and need to be re-engineered.”

Matthew Chiles: How about you, Helen? Are there any high-level advancements we can make here to address this issue of modern slavery in terms of eradication?

Helen Carter: I don't think they are as abstract as you think in terms of the fact that if you consider the prevention element of how we get into this space and also what modern slavery is a result of, which is vulnerability, organizations can start to think about how you tie those people aspects together.

So, what leads to an individual being vulnerable? It could be education, or it could be discrimination. If you look at the garment industry for example, a significant number of employees are female, and it's in a sector where discrimination is rife. So tying into well-being, discrimination, employment models and employment conditions sits a bit better with businesses to a certain extent because they can tie it in with what it means to employ people and bring in the right conditions.

Moving away from addressing modern slavery, exploitation and other human rights factors as a compliance issue is a good place to start. And understand this idea that what you fundamentally want is a system that does no harm. We're used to that within a health and safety environment, so why shouldn't we be doing that within employment and from a people's strategy perspective?

So, I totally agree with Ryan, if businesses can't address all the societal inequalities, the role of the state has a huge part to play in this. But where businesses have influence, thinking about how they can eliminate those vulnerabilities is a really good way to start to think about how we can really try and tackle some of the challenges around modern slavery.

Matthew Chiles: So, Helen. You've obviously brought us back there to the organization. I’m just wondering, from an organizational level, what should organizations be doing to engage their suppliers and their contractors (and subcontractors too) to look to abolish this issue of modern slavery?

Helen Carter: I think for me it's about making sure that there is collaboration. Procurement within organizations is traditionally seen as very tactical – putting things into my tenders, or my contract conditions – and then the risk-averse organizations will immediately stop working with a supplier if there's some sort of reputational risk.

I think what needs to happen is - once you've identified who those organizations are, where that prioritization is and where you have leverage - you need to work collectively with that supply chain. It's the only way you can then start to drive improvements.

“Continuous improvement has to be the aim here with your supply chain. So engage them, train them, work with them.”

I think my final point is the idea of leverage.

If you have leverage with a supplier and in a procurement world leverage is “I spend enough money with them”. So, starting to think about what leverage and/or influence looks like with your supply chain is really important. 

And if you don't have that direct versus direct relationship, how do I create an influence with the supply chain to dig deeper, to try and really start to improve some of these conditions? That could be collaborating with industry bodies, or it could simply be getting a whole load of suppliers together to work in this space.

One thing I have found is that things like modern slavery aren’t areas where people want to compete, they might want other things, but this is an area where they do genuinely want to try and address some of the issues.

Matthew Chiles: I’ll let you come back in Ryan, but not with 20 million things! Narrow it down for us. 

Ryan Lynch: Everything Helen said was spot on. When I think about how any system may fail or what a good management system looks like, I'm typically thinking about, and this might sound dry or abstract, but it's actually really quite simple and practical: policies and procedures, communication skills or enablers, monitoring or measuring, and then how is it governed and how does it continue to improve? 

So, in the context of modern slavery, is there a policy by the organization? Is it endorsed, embraced and advocated by leadership? That's absolutely necessary. Is it baked into contractual agreements? Is it cascading down into clear work instructions for anybody who touches the process? Is there a systematic, consistent assessment of impacts in decisions that the business makes? 

All that bundles into that first category of defining what this is, what the process is, and what the commitments are. 

From a communication perspective, it's really about: how does information flow throughout an organization or through a network? So that could be laterally across functions – one function makes a decision, it has a negative impact on another, and they don't have visibility into one another's work. 

It can be down to suppliers. You know, “here are my expectations of you”. It can be up from workers. Do I understand your needs? Is there a systematic way of engaging those stakeholders and understanding what's important to them and how they're impacted, and does it flow up to leadership so they're in a position to make informed decisions?

From a skills and enablers perspective, do suppliers understand what's expected, but also understand how to put these systems in place within their own business as an employer? And are those skills in place for recruiters that might be throughout the process? What skills are in place for mid-level managers and for individual workers, like HR professionals? Are they enabled to successfully support the policy because they've been empowered and are accountable and have the right skills in place?

From a monitoring or measurement perspective, do we have this systematic assessment of impacts at multiple points in the process? Do we understand workplace demographics, whether it's gender, nationality, religion, or migrants versus locals? All of those impact how these risks can manifest themselves to the worker. And to Helen's earlier point, not just looking at risk to the business, but to the supplier, to the worker, to the local community etc.

Some companies from a measurements perspective will gather information from suppliers through questionnaires they issue. That's a scalable way to do this, but the downside is you're not actually speaking with workers, so that's really essential. Where you have the resources and the negative impacts manifest themselves, you really do need to be speaking with workers. 

Then from a governance perspective, is this owned at leadership level? Is this baked into a continuous improvement process? Is this baked into incentives for buyers? It's all of these things. If any of these elements I just mentioned break down, the entire system can break too. 

We use this as a sort of diagnosis for what should be in place and how to spot what's not in place that might be causing some of these risks to present themselves. 

Helen Carter: Can I just add to that?

“One of the things that a lot of businesses tend to focus on is: what do you need to do in the supply chain? What should you be doing for me? How do you need to do this? 

I think sometimes they forget the unintended consequences of some of the decisions that they make and the pressures that they put on their supply chain. So understanding their role as the client and their behaviours and how that affects things that are happening in their supply chain is really important.”

A great example of that was COVID-19, particularly in the garment industry. When shops completely closed down, people weren't buying clothes and a lot of garment retailers just cancelled their orders or refused to take any stock. Therefore it went to countries where there are huge aspects of vulnerability, low pay, low-skill, and suddenly their vulnerability index went up seven-fold.

I see it with mobilization in construction contracts where a client will ask a supplier to do something for them and then literally give them a week to pull it together and get it delivered in the time they need it to.

All that pressure on a supply chain means that the behaviours that they're going through, or the behaviours of the suppliers, are about meeting the needs of the client no matter what at any cost. 

So I think businesses need to have the systems, they need to work with their suppliers, but they also need to understand, as an ultimate client, the responsibility they have to make sure those conditions are right for the supply chain, to ensure they're not cutting any corners, nor making any decisions that could lead to these sorts of issues occurring.

Matthew Chiles: You have talked about issues around culture and leadership, management and putting some policies and processes in place. I just wonder, what's the positive role of technology and digitalization to address this issue? What technologies or systems could be utilized?

Ryan Lynch: As I mentioned earlier, one of the challenges that is inherent in tackling this is the issue of scale. If I've got hundreds or thousands of suppliers, it's simply hard to understand where risk is presenting itself to workers throughout the supply chain. So I think technology potentially has a central role in a lot of this. 

“This should not be a replacement for actually speaking to human beings and understanding how they’re impacted, because that's hard enough to get to the issue, even with a really skilled interviewer.”

But to be able to engage a lot of suppliers at scale, we have a workflow and reporting tool that we use with some of our customers, where they're pushing out sets of questions to their suppliers to understand the controls or management systems that they have in place, and their level of awareness of the risks that they're dealing with whether it's modern slavery or otherwise.

So if we're able to gather information about the workforce demographics that might be a signal to the client to say, yeah, I need to take a closer look at that because the potential for risk is greater here, I would not have known that if I couldn't reach out to a hundred or a thousand suppliers at once.

Then, do they really have an understanding of what a good management system looks like specific to managing these risks? You see enterprise platforms like that, that either manage this data, the dialogue, or the corrective action process. They can be a useful tool to enable this.

Then you get into forward-looking technologies like blockchain and traceability. I know BSI has done some work not specific to modern slavery around that, creating a traceable chain of custody to have a higher degree of confidence that at least we know where things are coming from, now we're in a better position to investigate further where that's needed. 

Matthew Chiles: Helen, do you want to come in on that? 

Helen Carter: I agree with everything Ryan said in terms of the fact that it's about efficiency, it's about reach, the ability to get deeper into some of your supply chains in an efficient way without putting a load of people on the end of a phone call. I think there are a couple of other things though that are quite useful.

When you have that worker's voice, although there's nothing better than face-to-face interaction, it can be a vehicle for things like whistleblowing. It can be a vehicle for capturing people who want to report something but are scared. 

In a lot of instances, people who are victims of modern slavery are frightened and don't necessarily recognize themselves as this. So it's a good vehicle for that ability to report and ability to communicate relatively independently and to a certain extent anonymously, too. But at the same time safely. 

I think the other thing, and I've seen this in the UK, there's an app called Just Good Work. I know it's used in agriculture, but I think it's also being used in some of the garment industry, and it's designed to cross borders and educate people on what their rights are. 

So again, one of the prevention things that can be looked at is educating individuals so that they understand our recruitment fees, the right thing to pay, what they should be entitled to and what are the employment conditions in the country that they're going into when they are looking at migrating for work. 

“This sort of technology is great at being able to talk to people, in their own language, in a way that allows them to understand what their rights are and eliminate some of that vulnerability.”

There are lots of ways that technology can help. One of the key things here is data collection not taking on the responsibility of due diligence. So I see this a lot with organizations who say, “oh, I've got a traceability system”. It tells them where everything's from and they think “because it's not from a particular region that everyone's worried about, therefore I'm ok”. 

It’s an efficient mechanism to gather the information, but there still needs to be that interpretation, that education around what should I be asking, or who should I be speaking to. How should I get some of this information? Technology definitely helps in this space to make it easier, but doesn't take away any responsibility for having that conversation or doing those checks – it just makes it easier.

Matthew Chiles: You both talked about some of the organizational responsibility that's required and the politics, procedures and mechanisms to be put in place, either at a person level or technological level. But we're talking about a really important issue here, modern slavery and there are government policies and legislation here as well.

Helen, just to come to you on the relationship here between government policies and legislation and the role of standards. What are we talking about here?

Helen Carter: When I started looking at the legislation before the Modern Slavery Act came out, I was trying to get to grips with what the UK was trying to do. There's been legislation similar to this in the California Transparency Act, and we're starting to see a huge wave of this sort of legislation happening globally. The EU has its own current thinking around human rights and environmental due diligence.

One thing I'm seeing improve with each iteration of legislation that's coming through is more need to see the visibility of what's happening in the supply chain. But what I'm not seeing happen, and I think this is where maybe standards are helping a little bit, is really getting to the nitty gritty of full responsibility.

Whose responsibility is it? Most of it seems to be down to reporting, and I’ve seen all the different types of legislation through Europe, which really don't hold businesses accountable. The attitude is that you produce a report and then that's fine. So, legislation's been really successful in raising awareness, but if you get to the nitty-gritty of what all the legislation is talking about, we've yet to see businesses being successfully prosecuted under any of the legislation that's out there.

A lot of the litigation that seems to be in place, I class as ‘strategic litigation’. It's more about trying to use the bill to raise awareness of bad practices. 

Businesses are feeling the pressure, trying to get to grips with how it all works, because every single piece of legislation is slightly different, and if you're global, that can give you a bit of a headache.

I think the role of standards is – and we struggled with this ourselves when we were doing the 25700 standard – how do we use legislation as the base, but actually really get to grips with what the legislation is trying to do and use standards to push businesses towards that? 

Not to comply, but to do the best practice, talk about all the stuff that Ryan and I have been discussing throughout this podcast around the systems they need to have in place, the checks and balances, and the cultural change that needs to happen. 

If you go towards a standard approach, it means you're compliant with the legislation, albeit the legislation doesn't have a huge amount of focus in this space at the moment. However, it does mean that you can then start to keep a pace of it, keep ahead of it as the legislation gets better and more sophisticated over time which is what it's doing at the moment.

Matthew Chiles: What’s your perspective, Ryan? 

Ryan Lynch: Well, I think standards are powerful because they're an agreed-upon framework that's developed through consensus. So, when there's a great deal of variability in a system, that increases costs, which reduces speed. From a business perspective, a standardized way to go about solving a problem is usually a good thing.

I hear complaints either from the buyer side or from the supplier side about the redundancy with some of these sorts of broad initiatives across a sector. So from the buyer side, they're saying, “oh, I did an audit of my supplier”, for example, and they said that they're audited by other customers – “I wish I could have visibility into that”. So you've seen more information-sharing platforms over the past 10 to 15 years arise.  

From the supplier side, it's like, “this is my eighth audit in the past six months by eight different clients and they're essentially asking the same thing. Can we eliminate some of the redundancy and let me ideally focus my resources on driving improvements, engaging the workforce, etc.”

“ Regulations create a consistent set of rules. So the one thing businesses hate more than regulation is unpredictability. If there's a consistent set of rules, it's a predictable operating environment. Whether a business likes it or doesn't like it, they're playing against a consistent set of rules with their peers and they know the boundaries within that.”

I wish I had a statistic to back up what I'm about to say, but I'm willing to bet that predictable marketplaces are generally going to be more stable and more resilient.

Matthew Chiles: As a final thought then Ryan, what's the future of ethical supply chains? What do they look like? 

Ryan Lynch: Well, I don't know if this is what they will look like, but I would love for us to collectively think bigger with less of a top-down compliance focus, and ideally individuals and organizations to make values-based and values-driven decisions. Again, it's kind of squishy and hard to define, but if you follow the thread all the way back to the things that drive behavior, at the core of that is: what are people's values, what are society's values and businesses’ values?

Some of that also gets into what I mentioned earlier on how we're accounting for value. So people equate X amount of monetary value, but there's so much outside of that from a human and environmental impact perspective that is important and that we rely on. If those things break down, your money's worthless.

“ This calls for new ways of thinking about how we value things, and a need to come to some agreed upon definitions around that. That way, instead of forcing behaviour from the top down, how do we cultivate it from the bottom up? I don't know if that manifests itself in new forms of ownership or equity in organizations. If we're tackling the problem of inequality, many other problems are so intrinsically tied into that, that we're naturally solving those problems as well.”

Ryan Lynch: And how about you, Helen? What is the future of ethical supply chains? 

Helen Carter: I think for me it's the balanced approach. I'm seeing this more, I mean, I go back to COP27. We're finally starting to see a conversation happening where we're beginning to square the box, pull together things like climate change with just transition and the impact it's having on people.

We're starting to see an evolution where an organization understands the impact it's having on the supply chain. It's understanding the impact it's having on the environment that it's operating in and is starting to make decisions in a much more responsible way and can evidence them. 

Most organizations now can produce a nice shiny ESG document that talks about how amazing they are. We're experiencing a backlash against greenwashing or ethical washing at the moment. So for me, the supply chain future has to be balanced and it has to be evidenced. For businesses to start thinking about how they measure impact beyond just monetization, into driving, as Ryan said, that value proposition would be great. 

“I don't think we're ever going to be in a position where we can stand up and say we've addressed everybody's human rights, but I'd like every business to be able to stand up and say “we've taken responsibility. This is the impact we've had. This is where it's worked. This is where it hasn't.” For organizations to be able to share that in a way that I think would make a real meaningful change in the business environment.”

Find the previous session on the role of consumers within ethical supply chains with BSI’s Principle Consultant in Sustainable Supply Chains, Fred Waelter.

In the next session, Matthew Chiles speaks to Dame Sara Thornton, former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner in the UK, and Dr. Alex Trautrims, Professor of Supply Chain Management at Nottingham University Business School and Associate Director at Rights Lab about using standards to protect human rights. Find part 3 of the modern slavery podcast here.