Giving Compass' Take:

• Many companies still need to focus more time on adhering to compliance standards in their supply chains.  

•Recommendations to remedy this problem involve giving supply chain workers more agency and taking away traditional power dynamics between employers and employees. What are the potential barriers of more agency for supply chain workers? 

• Read about another tactic for ethical supply chains: accelerating ethical recruitment. 

From consumers and potential employees to international governments, the UN Development Programme and World Economic Forum, attention is turning towards the importance of fair, respectful treatment in the supply chain. And yet, despite the flurry of external interest, the majority of businesses have struggled to improve human rights effectively with suppliers and partners and to ensure the rights of workers throughout the many layers of their value chains.

Great progress has been made in some areas and industries; the apparel industry coming together to sign the Bangladesh Accord is a powerful example. And yet, in many companies, ensuring human rights within the supply chain remains the responsibility of one or two teams, enforced through compliance standards and audits that aren’t always locally relevant, practical to implement, or transparently adhered to.

Part of the struggle is that many of those standards are developed without adequate inputs from suppliers and workers and, as a result, create artificial solutions or drive inefficiencies that guzzle time and money without providing tangible value in return. In the worst cases, the compliance process creates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality between corporate teams and supplier leadership that makes it difficult to address the biggest human rights issues at the root of the problem.

By disrupting the entrenched mentality of the ‘enforcer’ and ‘enforced’ – and actively engaging employees and suppliers in the process of human rights and equal treatment for all – companies can place greater agency into the hands of its people and its supply chain.

Read the full article about human rights in the global supply chain by Laura Quinn at Triple Pundit.