A systematic literature review of modern slavery through benchmarking global supply chain

Abstract

PurposeThe globalisation of supply chains has contributed to modern slavery by degrading labour standards and work practices. The inherent difficulties involved in monitoring extremely fragmented production processes also render workers in and from developing countries vulnerable to labour exploitation. This research adopts a benchmark methodology that will help examine the inherent modern slavery challenges.Design/methodology/approachThis study examines how the benchmark model, including governance, risk assessment, purchasing practice, recruitment and remedy of victims, addresses supply chain modern slavery challenges. The proposed hypotheses are tested based on the reoccurring issues of modern slavery in global supply chains.FindingsEstimations suggest that modern slavery is a growing and increasingly prominent international problem, indicating that it is the second largest and fastest growing criminal enterprise worldwide except for narcotics trafficking. These social issues in global supply chains have drawn attention to the importance of verifying, monitoring and mapping supply chains, especially in lengthy and complex supply chains. However, the advent of digital technologies and benchmarking methodologies has become one of the existing key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring the effectiveness of modern slavery initiatives in supply chains.Originality/valueThis review provides an understanding of the current situation of global supply chains concerning the growing social issue of modern slavery. However, this includes various individual specialities relating to global supply chains, modern slavery, socially sustainable supply chain management (SCM), logistic social responsibility, corporate social responsibility and digitalisation. Furthermore, the review provided important implications for researchers examining the activities on benchmarking the effectiveness of the existing initiatives to prevent modern slavery in the supply chains.

Country of Origin of Medical Products and Risk of Labour Rights Abuse: A Cross-Sectional Analysis Using Four Procurement Datasets

“…We determined a product to be at high-risk of labour rights abuse where the COO was one with known systematic violations of worker rights (rating 4) or no guarantee of rights (rating 5 or 5+) as defined by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) Global Rights Index for 2016 [11]. This rating scale enables comparison of risk between datasets and utilises a variety of sources on real rights abuse instances alongside assessment of each country's legal processes to inform contemporaneous risk ratings, minimising bias compared to supplier reporting [12,13]. We calculated the proportion of products at high-risk of labour abuse for all medical products and the proportion within each super-category.…”

“…Our study also highlights the potential utility of identifying high-risk products through COO as an initial approach to identifying risk, which could then be complemented by a rigorous investigation of potential high-risk areas [12]. However, in spite of our analysis being to date the most comprehensive assessment of the risk of labour rights abuses in medical supply chains, our attempts to identify high-risk products were limited by poor availability and transparency of COO data.…”

“…The first six columns relate to the Norway dataset: the name of the product category or super-category is shown in column 1 (with category/super-category in brackets indicating which of these is true for this group), columns 2-5 list the COO by contract value (in Euros, €) and the proportion of products from that COO alongside its ITUC rating, column 6 describes the overall proportion by value of that group from high-risk COO. The last six columns (columns [7][8][9][10][11][12] relate to data drawn from the UN Comtrade database, with column 7 listing the HS 2017 product code [17] used to search the database (shortened names are used in this table, see the Appendices section for the full category code name used in HS 2017 nomenclature). The value of net exports in column 9 is reported in US Dollars (USD), where a value of 1 in the table equates to 1000 USD.…”

“…Thus, we believe that the proposed EU (and UK) diligence could be furthered by including the mandatory public declaration of product COO, which is already in place in countries such as Australia, Canada, South Korea, and the USA, but not the UK or EU [28]. Given the complexity of some products, in particular those with multiple components, the depth and granularity of transparency on COO will need to be sensitive to the particular product type and associated risk and also not simply focus on the first tier of a supply chain [12]. Transparency on COO will also help in quantifying and addressing environmental risks, given that typically 88% of the carbon footprint of single-use medical products is due to production [29].…”