So you think you know your supply chain?

Moral Money  Supply chains Add to myFT So you think you know your supply chain? With greater scrutiny by investors and new regulations, the issue of worker exploitation and abuse is more in the public eye than ever© Matt Kenyon

Sarah Murray

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In 2018 the Responsible Sourcing Network presented an alarming figure: twice as many people worldwide were in forced labour as had been taken to the Americas during the 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade.

In the five years since that statement by RSN, a US non-profit organisation that combats human rights and labour abuses in raw materials sourcing, the upending of supply chains caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has put millions more workers at risk of this kind of abuse.

Statistics on forced labour and human rights violations make for grim reading, not least because efforts to end such abuse have been going on for decades.

Bennett Freeman, a corporate responsibility adviser and vice-chair of RSN, remembers the birth of organisations such as the Clean Clothes Campaign in the Netherlands (1989), the Ethical Trading Initiative in the UK (1998) and the Fair Labor Association in the US (1999).

“This agenda emerged in the early to mid-90s and the moving parts were visible and working by the end of the 90s,” says Freeman, a US state department human rights and labour official at the time. “We’re talking about a quarter of a century of focus, effort, initiatives, successes and failures, and frankly there’s a big question to be asked about how much progress we’ve made.”

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Originally posted on: https://www.ft.com/content/687c2a10-403b-4a93-85c0-3ede41af5d09