Bernard Spragg. NZ/Flickr. CC (by-nc-nd)
We love buying exotic and low-priced food, cheap T-shirts, and eye-catching novelties. We love all these things that make us feel ‘special’. And as informed readers we might also have a sense of the long journey Uzbek or Brazilian cotton makes through China or India to become that precious T-shirt later resold in other parts of the world. This dispersion and fragmentation of global production is celebrated as one of the key features of the global economy. Indeed, Cattaneo et al. describe it as constituting its backbone and central nervous system.
What are the consequences of this for forced labour in supply chains? In this piece we examine several different initiatives aimed at addressing forced labour within globally fragmented production. Our goal is to highlight examples of what may or may not work as we begin to tackle this problem. We briefly discuss the global template provided by the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. We explore one corporate initiative in electronics, and we end with a grassroots action as an example of worker-driven responsibility.
