DOI: 10.14197/atr.201226261

Editorial: Shifting the Focus: From Corporate-led to Worker-centred Mechanisms for Eliminating Forced Labour in Global Value Chains

Judy Fudge

Abstract

This Editorial introduces a special issue of Anti-Trafficking Review, which examines measures to ensure corporate accountability for forced labour in value chains. It begins by explaining why multinational corporations are able to escape liability for business practices that foster labour exploitation in their value chains. It discusses the failure of voluntary attempts to hold lead firms in value chains accountable before examining two types of corporate-led mechanisms that harden voluntary corporate social responsibility techniques (transparency and human rights due diligence laws). It contrasts them with worker-driven mechanisms. After describing the contribution of each article in the Special Issue, it concludes by identifying some of the key challenges to eliminating forced labour and labour exploitation in global value chains.

Suggested citation: J Fudge, ‘Editorial: Shifting the Focus: From Corporate-led to Worker-centred Mechanisms for Eliminating Forced Labour in Global Value Chains’, Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 26, 2026, pp. 1-16, https://doi.org/10.14197/atr.201226261.

Introduction

More than fifteen years ago, academics, labour advocates, the International Labour Organization (ILO), and the United States government under the Obama administration identified forced labour as a core component of human trafficking and elevated it on the global policy agenda.^[1] The increased attention on forced labour as a global problem coincided with, and was propelled by, efforts at the United Nations to hold multinational corporations accountable for assessing, minimising, and remedying human rights harms, including forced labour, resulting from their business practices.^[2] This Special Issue of Anti-Trafficking Review explores different measures for holding multinational corporations accountable for forced labour in labour and supply chains, how different governance mechanisms came to be adopted, their impact on the workers they are supposed to protect, and possible strategies that labour advocates and workers can use to make these measures effective.

This Editorial briefly sets out the broader context in which the articles included in the Special Issue are located. First, it explains the role of multinational corporations in creating and sustaining global value chains, how their contracting practices result in a governance gap, and how this gap contributes to forced labour. Second, it describes the shift from private and voluntary forms of corporate social responsibility to mandatory attempts to make corporations accountable for forced labour in their value chains. Third, it contrasts forms of mandatory corporate-led labour governance with worker-driven initiatives that are designed to amplify workers’ voices as a way of tackling forced labour in value chains. After discussing the contributions within the Special Issue, it concludes by highlighting the challenges posed in the current nativist political climate for addressing forced labour in value chains.

Global Value Chains and the Governance Gap

The contemporary global economy is driven by multinational corporations (MNCs), which outsource production to other companies and create long subcontracting chains (called value or supply chains) across national borders.^[3] Companies within these value chains often rely on recruitment and employment agencies to recruit and manage migrant workers ‘sourced’ from other countries.^[4] This process of off-shoring and in-shoring jobs has challenged the capacity of national labour laws and unions to regulate the terms and conditions of labour.^[5] Moreover, as several articles in this Special Issue demonstrate, workers in the lower tiers of value chains are often recruited from groups who are marginalised on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, caste, language, and citizenship, since their lack of social status and networks makes them more vulnerable to exploitation and, thus, easier to control.^[6]

Increasingly concentrated in a few firms located in advanced economies, MNCs are typically the key actors in these chains, and they have the power to shape the environment in which they act.^[7] Countries in the Global South want to attract orders from MNCs based in more advanced economies. Thus, MNCs can often choose amongst a wide range of suppliers located in a host of lower-cost countries to obtain goods, components, and services, which can lead to regulatory arbitrage. Combined with repressive states and the lack of capacity of local actors, this competition between states for business often means that local labour markets, particularly in the Global South, are poorly regulated.^[8] Moreover, MNCs’ contracting practices—price strategies, delivery schedules, and penalty clauses, for example—mean that suppliers compete on price and efficiency, which can lead to low wages, unpaid and compulsory overtime, and coercive forms of control, such as gender-based violence and harassment, and debt bondage.^[9] Instead of value trickling down the chain, huge multinational firms located in advanced economies use their geographic flexibility and market power to extract large mark-ups at the expense of suppliers and workers in the Global South.^[10]

Additionally, across sectors as diverse as deep sea fishing and shipping, on the one hand, and construction and agriculture, on the other, suppliers and contractors in global value chains frequently rely on labour recruiters and employment agencies to assemble an obedient and low-wage workforce composed of migrant workers, who often lack political and legal rights, fluency in local languages, and social networks.^[11] Recruiters and employment agencies compete for contracts to supply labour, and many of these intermediaries charge migrant workers costly fees to obtain employment in another country. This practice of charging migrant workers for some or all the costs of recruitment, including recruitment fees, can result in large debts owed by migrant workers, who cannot leave exploitative working conditions because their travel documents have been seized or they are threatened with violence and other forms of retaliation.^[12] Recruiters often operate in both migrant-sending and migrant-receiving countries, making it is difficult to regulate transnational labour chains.

Thus, there is a mismatch, known as the ‘governance gap’, between the scale and impact of MNCs’ use of global value and labour chains to disperse production processes and workforces across many different countries and the ability of nation states to manage the adverse consequences of globalisation.^[13]

Voluntary Initiatives to Eliminate Forced Labour and Labour Exploitation

For over a quarter century, labour advocates in the Global North and Global South have joined forces to condemn labour exploitation in global supply chains, targeting prominent consumer-facing MNCs with consumer boycotts.^[14] In response, MNCs have adopted an array of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, such as supplier codes of conduct, certification schemes, and social auditing, to address violations of labour rights in their labour and supply chains.^[15] These CSR initiatives are often run by for-profit corporations that report directly to the MNCs that engage them, which compromises their independence.^[16] In part to address the poor public relations optics resulting from the close commercial relations between MNCs and for-profit social auditors and certifiers, MNCs have increasingly joined industry or issue-specific multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI). MSIs involve representatives from business, labour, and government in promoting corporate accountability for labour exploitation in global value chains. As Genevieve LeBaron explains in her article in this Special Issue, CSR has grown into a dynamic industry involving a range of private, public, and civil society actors that develop and deploy numerous social performance measurement tools used by non-state actors to codify, monitor, and, in some cases, certify firms’ compliance with labour rights.

While labour rights activists continued their efforts to challenge and strengthen these forms of private labour governance, they also hoped to achieve corporate accountability standards at the intergovernmental level. They joined with human rights advocates to seek stronger business and human rights standards at the United Nations.^[17] Traditionally, human rights obligations set out in international law have only applied to states. An attempt in the early 2000s by a sub-commission of the UN Commission on Human Rights to develop a set of norms placing human rights obligations directly on corporations failed. In 2005, Kofi Annan, the then UN Secretary-General, appointed John Ruggie, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, as Special Representative for Business and Human Rights to address businesses’ responsibility to respect human rights. In 2011, Ruggie proposed the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) as ‘a roadmap for helping to bridge the governance gaps and imbalances that must be addressed for global supply chains and globalization itself to become socially sustainable’.^[18]

Composed of thirty-one principles, the UNGPs were Ruggie’s attempt to develop authoritative standards of expected behaviour from businesses regarding human rights. A form of ‘soft’ law since they are voluntary, the UNGPs offered human rights due diligence (HRDD) as a process for businesses to meet their obligation to respect human rights without disrupting any of the legal doctrines (such as limited liability, separate legal personality, and contractual privity) that enable lead corporations in value chains to escape legal responsibility for harms resulting from their business practices.^[19] HRDD has three interconnected components: (1) identifying actual or potential adverse human rights impacts; (2) preventing and mitigating those impacts; and (3) accounting for impacts and the responses to them. The UNGPs provide guidance about the scope and complexity of due diligence obligations, how to prioritise redress for adverse human rights impacts, and when and how to disclose information to stakeholders. However, the guidelines are ambiguous about the extent to which states should supervise, or even mandate, corporate HRDD and the extent to which processes and outcomes are mandatory. This ‘strategic ambiguity’ helps to explain the UNGPs’ remarkable success.^[20] Adopted unanimously in 2011 by the forty-seven members of the Human Rights Council (selected from member states of the UN General Assembly), the UNGPs have been widely taken up by large MNCs.^[21]

About the same time, the United States experimented with mandatory forms of corporate accountability for forced labour in their value chains. Signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act contained a provision requiring companies to conduct supply chain due diligence and, where necessary, to obtain third‑party verification to ensure that the ‘conflict minerals’ used in their products were not sourced through forced labour.^[22] The same year the California legislature passed the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, which requires large corporations to disclose the extent of their efforts to eradicate modern slavery, forced labour, and human trafficking from their supply chains in five areas: verification, audits, certification, internal accountability, and training. Its goal is to provide consumers with information regarding companies’ efforts to eradicate forced labour so that consumers can make ‘more educated purchasing decisions.’^[23]

The Shift to Hard Law

These laws anticipated the broader shift from voluntary CSR initiatives to mandatory obligations for MNCs either to report on CSR initiatives or to implement HRDD after the Rana Plaza building collapse in 2013, in which more than 1,100 workers employed in garment factories in the building were killed and more than 2,500 injured. Many of the garment manufacturers in the building supplied prominent brands and retailers, which had codes of conduct requiring suppliers to meet labour standards. Indeed, in the days and weeks preceding the building’s collapse, several suppliers had successfully passed social audits.^[24] This tragedy clearly demonstrated the failure of voluntary CSR initiatives, and it led to increased public pressure on governments to impose requirements on MNCs designed to address forced labour in their supply chains.

Governments in the Global North responded by introducing two types of laws that impose obligations directly on MNCs: disclosure laws and due diligence laws. The former address either human rights violations in general or forced labour, modern slavery, and human trafficking in particular.^[25] They require firms to report on the steps, if any, they have taken to identify and mitigate the problem within their operations and supply chain. Transparency laws do not require these firms to do anything to rid their value chains of forced labour. As Jonelle Humphrey explains in her article in this Special Issue, Anglo‑American jurisdictions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, have favoured laws requiring large corporations to only disclose their efforts to address forced labour, modern slavery, and human trafficking. The problem with transparency laws is that there is no evidence that they are effective in addressing forced labour. Indeed, a parliamentary review of the UK’s Modern Slavery Act 2015 reported in 2024 that the ‘current legislation is too limited to have significant practical impact’.^[26]

By contrast, several European countries and the European Union have adopted laws requiring companies to conduct HRDD.^[27] These measures cover broader human rights issues (and often environmental harms) and impose affirmative due diligence obligations, penalties for inadequate compliance, and, in some cases, liability where companies contribute to human rights abuses. These laws differ widely in terms of approach and design details.^[28] A common limitation of HRDD laws is that they do not require MNCs to involve workers and their representatives at all levels of the value chain in the design, implementation, and operation of grievance and remedial procedures.^[29] Moreover, research has revealed that most companies opt for managerialist-oriented approaches to HRDD and try to cascade responsibilities and costs in their supply chain.^[30] Still, it remains unclear whether—and under what conditions—such laws can be used to mobilise and empower workers in global supply chains. Marie Diekmann’s article in this Special Issue demonstrates that social actors, including vulnerable migrant workers employed in German supply chains, can use such laws in unexpected ways to achieve their goals.

Worker-driven Corporate Accountability

Scepticism in academic, policy, and advocacy circles about the effectiveness of top-down CSR approaches has shifted attention to bottom-up approaches based on worker participation and voice.^[31] Worker-driven social responsibility (WSR) initiatives aim to make lead companies liable for working conditions in their supply chains and put workers and their representative organisations, rather than corporations, in the driver’s seat. As Anannya Bhattacharjee’s article in this Special Issue explains, WSR initiatives involve worker organisations (both trade unions and civil society organisations), suppliers, and MNCs entering into enforceable and legally binding agreements, whereby corporate brands and retailers commit to using their supply chain relationships and leverage to support raising labour standards at certain worksites or sectors. These agreements, which are known as enforceable brand agreements, are the fulcrum of WSR initiatives. They have emerged in diverse geographical contexts and sectors, and originate from different movements (e.g., migrant rights, labour, gender justice) with varying demands (e.g., around wages, health and safety, forced labour, gender-based violence); as such, the specific features, parties, and implementation arrangements of WSR agreements all vary.^[32] Key features of WSR models are the involvement of workers and their representatives in determining and monitoring standards, and access by workers to legally binding complaint mechanisms that are enforceable against lead firms. As Mareike Standow, Nandita Shivakumar, and Thivya Rakini suggest in their article in this Special Issue, MNCs could draw on these features of WSR initiatives to provide more effective grievance and remedial mechanisms as part of their HRDD obligations. Their article shows how a WSR initiative designed to eliminate gender-based violence in an Indian garment factory provided grievance and remedial mechanisms that leveraged workers’ agency and amplified their voices.

This Special Issue

The articles featured in the Special Issue explore various aspects of the shift from voluntary CSR to legally required or legally enforceable initiatives to address forced labour in global supply chains. They range in geographic context from the Global North, including the European Union, the United States, Canada, and Germany, to countries in the Global South, such as Peru, India, and Indonesia, as well as Asian migration corridors. The articles are written by academics, labour activists, and corporate accountability advocates.

The Special Issue opens with Genevieve LeBaron’s article, in which she argues that it is time to take stock and consider whether the recent spate of ‘hard’ law mechanism to hold corporations accountable for forced labour in their supply chains is, in fact, an advance over CSR. Taking a wide-angle lens, she examines what is required of MNCs by transparency laws, due diligence legislation, forced labour import bans, and multilateral trade efforts, and suggests that they reinforce and rely on, rather than replace, CSR tools like social audits. She concludes that these hard laws will likely increase the market for CSR without requiring MNCs to change the business practices that create the conditions in which forced labour and labour exploitation flourish.

Drilling deeper into a how corporate accountability mechanisms work within a specific jurisdiction and industry, the article by Christian Campos-Vásquez, Jaris Mujica, Ángel Peñaloza González, Nicolás Zevallos Trigoso, and Alonso Flores Macher examines a set of regulations, managerial instruments, and trade standards (largely influenced by free trade agreements) that appear to ensure strict control of the Amazonian timber supply chain to determine whether this regulatory assemblage has stopped the forced labour associated with illegal logging in Peru. Despite the appearance of strict legal control, their detailed empirical investigation of the traceability scheme reveals that the dense institutional framework is permeable to illegal timber flows and, as a result, has failed to address forced labour in the supply chain.

Jonelle Humphrey’s article examines the factors that led to the enactment of either transparency or HRDD legislation in different countries in the Global North. She shows how key features of Canada’s political economy—the significance of the oil, gas, and mining sectors to Canada’s economy, the role of key corporations, civil society organisations, political parties, trading partners, and institutional heritage—led to the enactment of a transparency law that requires corporations to do nothing more than to report on their efforts to address forced labour in their supply chains. Looking at the experience of other Anglo-American jurisdictions that have enacted transparency laws, she suggests that such laws are a dead end instead of a first step towards making MNCs accountable for the harms their business practices foster.

Treating the implementation of HRDD laws as an opportunity to make corporations accountable for eliminating forced labour in their supply chains, Jason Judd and Sarosh Kuruvilla argue that new forms of disclosure by corporations are required. Under voluntary due diligence initiatives, most firms disclose their plans, policies, and processes regarding human rights risks, making it hard for regulators, consumers, and investors to measure either effectiveness or progress. By contrast, Judd and Kuruvilla argue that a risk-based due diligence process should measure labour outputs and information about sourcing countries. They present twenty-five metrics they developed to measure both lead firm sourcing practices and supplier firm labour rights and working conditions. Not only are these metrics useful for regulators to assess how lead firms covered under due diligence legislation are addressing human rights harms in their supply chains, but they also argue that their metrics can be used by lead firms themselves to assess the level and salience of risks of forced labour and other violations of key labour standards.

The fifth article in the Special Issue discusses a stubborn and widespread problem in labour chains: the imposition of recruitment expenses and fees on workers in the recruitment process and its relationship to debt bondage and other forms of forced labour. Based on in-depth interviews with almost 4,000 foreign migrant workers in Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand conducted between 2020 and 2025, Ana Maria Soto Bernal, Lisa Rende Taylor, and Mark Taylor’s article investigates how effectively the ‘Employer Pays Principle’ (EPP)—which requires all fees and related costs of recruitment of workers in their supply chains to be borne by employers, not jobseekers and workers—is supported by MNCs and implemented across their supply chains. They found that most workers in Southeast Asian labour chains are paying recruitment fees for their jobs, including workers that are supposed to be recruited under the EPP policies of global buyers. The problem, they conclude, is structural and economic, as MNCs have not voluntarily revised their pricing policies to accommodate the costs of ethical recruitment.

The final four articles in the Special Issue concentrate on the agency and efforts of workers and their advocates to develop ways to address forced labour and other forms of labour exploitation in value chains. Noting that it is impossible to appreciate the effects of any law simply from reading the legal text, Marie Diekmann presents a case study of a wildcat strike by migrant truck drivers (mostly from Uzbekistan and Georgia) against a Polish trucking firm that was part of an integrated German transport supply chain, and how the truck drivers leveraged the German HRDD law (German Supply Chain Act (GSCA)) to achieve payment of their unpaid wages. Taking place in Gräfenhausen, Germany, in 2023, the strike, which lasted over ten weeks and involved hunger strikes, attracted the attention of the Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control (BAFA), which serves as the administrative supervisory authority for compliance with the GSCA. Basing their claim for unpaid wages on the GSCA enabled the drivers to hold German companies at the end of the supply chain accountable, despite lacking direct contractual relationships with them. Diekmann’s study demonstrates how cultivating solidarity infrastructures with labour and migrant advocates, churches, and trade unions was critical to bringing the dispute to the attention of the regulator and to successfully using the GSCA to resolve it.

Focusing on a WSR initiative implemented in a garment factory in Dindigul (located in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu), Mareike Standow, Nandita Shivakumar, and Thivya Rakini’s article uses participatory action research to examine the role of freedom of association and meaningful stakeholder engagement in enhancing grievance mechanisms.^[33] Taking the UNGPs (especially the criteria set out in Principle 31) as the benchmark for effective grievance mechanisms in due-diligence processes, they evaluate the impact of the grievance mechanisms provided in the 2022 Dindigul Agreement, which is the first example of an enforceable brand agreement in India and Asia. Designed to address the widespread and pernicious problem of gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) in a garment factory that employs mostly women workers, many of whom are Dalits or internal migrants, the Dindigul Agreement put in place a cooperative remediation system involving workers, the local union, and management through structured activities and pre-defined procedural guidelines. After documenting how the grievance mechanisms operated within local realities, the authors conclude that the grievance mechanisms in the Dindigul Agreement meet the requirements set out in Principle 31 of the UNGPs and serve as an example of how to implement meaningful stakeholder engagement in the supply chains as required under HRDD laws.

Broadening her analysis beyond the Dindigul Agreement to include the Central Java Agreement for Gender Justice in Indonesia (2025), Anannya Bhattacharjee draws upon her experience in developing and implementing the two WSR initiatives in Asia designed to address gender-based violence and harassment in garment factories. She argues that effective anti-GBVH supply chain agreements in the garment industry must be founded in freedom of association and embedded within appropriate labour movement ecosystems.^[34] She introduces the concept of ‘labour movement ecosystems’ to illustrate the need both to develop an understanding of the labour movement that goes beyond traditional unionism, and to develop and deploy an intersectional perspective needed to address the practices of gender-based violence and harassment that are deeply rooted in garment value chains that source from Asia. Bhattacharjee shows how the agreements were designed to facilitate bargaining across scales (the supplier and the brands), implement an intersectional perspective sensitive to a variety of social relations of power, promote women’s trade union leadership, and cultivate equal partnerships between civil society organisations based in the Global North and Global South. She concludes that this type of labour movement ecosystem is critical for developing freedom of association and bargaining structures that span the local, national, regional, and global scales that make up garment supply chains.

In a comment rounding out the contributions to the Special Issue that are about worker-centred approaches to identifying and responding to labour violations in MNCs, Sandar Linn draws on examples from Southeast Asia to argue that MNCs should move beyond traditional audit-based models and adopt strategies that prioritise worker involvement, transparency, and long-term accountability.

The Special Issue concludes with Ayushman Bhagat’s review of Stephanie Limoncelli’s recently released book Advocacy, Inc.: INGOs and the Business of “Modern Slavery”.^[35] Bhaghat explains that the book provides a much-needed critique of anti-slavery international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) for their entanglement with corporate interests that reproduce the very inequalities and exploitative systems they purportedly aim to dismantle. He further points out how, in her engaging and thoroughly researched book, Limoncelli demonstrates how the framing of ‘modern slavery’ as a business concern casts MNCs as both the victims of modern slavery, through their exposure to reputational risks, and as major actors in eliminating modern slavery.

Conclusion

Mandatory initiatives requiring MNCs to address forced labour, human trafficking, and modern slavery are an attempt to ‘shore up the fading legitimacy of global neoliberal capitalism—an economic, political, and social project that promotes profitability and accumulation as the measures of economic and social activities, which are encouraged through a core set of policies, including liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, recommodification, and globalisation’.^[36] However, the current attack on multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization, United Nations, and International Labour Organization, which was initiated by the first Trump administration and is currently deepening under his second administration, has not disrupted corporate concentration or neoliberalism but simply turned it in a nationalist and nativist direction. Key states in the European Union have taken a step back from HRDD legislation, and the European Union has watered down the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive to make it less onerous for businesses.^[37] While the existing crop of HRDD laws does not require worker-centred grievance mechanisms or worker-centred remedies, it is still possible that in certain contexts workers and advocates may be able to use them in innovative ways to bring pressure upon MNCs to address forced labour and other forms of labour exploitation in their supply chains.

Bans prohibiting the importation of goods made in whole or in part with forced labour have become an increasingly popular tool for addressing forced labour in global value chains. Developed and implemented first by the United States, forced labour import bans are unilateral trade restrictions that prohibit the importation of goods made in whole or in part with forced labour into domestic markets.^[38] As part of trade agreements with the United States, the following countries—Canada, Mexico, Cambodia, and Malaysia—have either implemented or agreed to introduce forced labour import bans, and more countries are expected to follow.^[39] On 19 November 2024, the European Union formally adopted a regulation prohibiting products made with forced labour. But unlike the US forced labour ban that only applies to imported goods, the EU also bans the exportation of goods made with forced labour from the EU.^[40]

Despite their common label, forced labour import bans differ widely in key design features: whether a ban is directed at, for example, a shipment, workplace, supplier, importer, or industry; the legal framework and institutional context, including aspects such as the burden of proof, or processes available to contest a decision to ban; and the administrative culture and practices in which they are inserted. While there is evidence that importers against whom a preliminary ban has been issued have compensated workers who were reasonably suspected of being in situations of forced labour, there is nothing in any of the existing forced labour import bans that requires the officials administering the bans to consult with the workers affected by them or to require the importers subject to the bans to compensate the affected workers.^[41]

Led either by MNCs domiciled in countries in the Global North or powerful states, primarily the United States, neither HRDD laws nor forced labour import bans, as currently designed, amplify the voices of workers in the Global South as part of the solution to eliminating forced labour in value chains. By contrast, WSR initiatives are specifically designed to do this by involving different forms of workers’ representation, promoting freedom of association, and providing a meaningful role to local unions.^[42] The challenge is to devise ways to scale WSR initiatives beyond specific factories and suppliers to cover sectors, such as garment, that cover a number of different countries.^[43] WSR initiatives, like CSR and HRDD measures, rely on the market power of MNCs to ensure that suppliers respect labour rights.

None of the current tools for eliminating forced labour in value chains directly address the central problem: the concentrated power of MNCs within the global economy and the contracting practices that result in forced labour. Much needs to be done to level the playing field between MNCs and the countries in the Global North in which they primarily reside, on the one hand, and workers, suppliers, and states in the Global South, on the other. The enforcement of robust antitrust and competition laws, equitable taxation regimes that capture and distribute the profits that MNCs siphon off value chains, and changes to elements of corporate law are needed to prevent corporate behemoths from exploiting workers and degrading the planet in pursuit of unsustainable profits.

Notes: