Giving Compass' Take:

• The Responsible Business Alliance recently received a grant from the Walmart Foundation to implement programs which will promote ethical supply chain recruitment practices and provide additional support to workers in Malaysia. 

• How can we increase awareness around ethical supply chain practices and workers' rights? How can philanthropists collaborate on this front and engage this problem abroad?

• Other corporations are also looking into this line of projects. Read about their approach to improving supply chains. 

The Responsible Business Alliance (RBA), formerly the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC),  announced the RBA Foundation received a $1 million grant from the Walmart Foundation to help build a robust and responsible recruitment marketplace for migrant labor in Malaysia and surrounding nations.

Through this investment, the RBA Foundation and its supporting program partner, ELEVATE, aim to help break the cycle of exploitation common in foreign migrant worker recruitment and employment experiences in the region by transforming the market for ethical business practices and including workers themselves in developing solutions to persistent challenges.

Global supply chains are complex and fragmented, leaving migrant workers particularly vulnerable to exploitation, on a spectrum from unpaid overtime to modern-day slavery.

The RBA Foundation and ELEVATE will work together over a 24-month period to implement a solutions-oriented program, including publicly available education and information, focusing downstream to detect and address forced labor.

The RBA has worked over the past decade to promote responsible sourcing practices in global electronics supply chains, offering a social audit standard, training and resources to improve social accountability.

The program will aim to:

  • Accelerate the transformation of recruitment markets and reduce the risk of forced labor
  • Develop public education and resources on forced labor and ethical sourcing
  • Implement ELEVATE’s Laborlink Forced Labor Index Survey and Recruitment Survey to capture thousands of new data points from workers
  • Scale a labor agency maturity system to create a network of business partners that meet international expectations for ethical recruitment
  • Include foreign migrant workers directly in solution development by educating them on their individual and collective rights through the rollout of a customized education curriculum aimed at knowledge sharing and skills training

Read the full article about ethical supply chain recruitment at Responsible Business Alliance.