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More than 50 million people in the world are estimated to be in a situation of modern slavery, the most extreme form of labour exploitation. Many of them are working in sectors such as mining and agriculture, which produce price-sensitive commodity products and where workers are particularly vulnerable. Against this challenge, we analyse a successful intervention against modern slavery in a place that has been labelled the “ground zero of modern slavery in the US”. The Fair Food Programme was established in the tomato growing industry in Immokalee, Florida, and is based on an innovative joint action between farmers, buyers, and workers. We use an agent-based model built on qualitative field data to explain the success of the programme and to investigate whether the programme could be successfully transferred to other contextual settings. We model several market structures and measure the time it takes for all actors in the system to join the Fair Food Programme after a shock event (such as a case of modern slavery being discovered) triggered a dynamic of joint action. Our model shows that a high heterogeneity in farmer sizes leads to an increase in the time taken for them all to join the Fair Food Programme, while a high heterogeneity in buyer sizes speeds up reaching the tipping point towards joint action. We discuss these results and their implications for the transferability of the Fair Food Programme as a voluntary, incentive-driven approach towards tackling modern slavery, to other locations and contexts.

Recent estimates suggest that more than 40 million people worldwide are in situations of modern slavery and other forms of labor exploitation. UN Sustainable Development Goal 8.7 addresses this problem and urges stakeholders to take effective measures to end all forms of labor exploitation by 2030. Labor exploitation is often a direct consequence of forced migration, and humanitarian operations have a key role to play in tackling this issue worldwide. Academic research can facilitate this by providing the necessary decision-making tools to support antislavery practitioners in humanitarian organizations and governments. For effective resource allocation, these practitioners need tools to help them systematically identify and assess the risks of labor exploitation in an area. In this paper, we develop a multi-method approach that combines various data sources to capture the issue’s complex and multidimensional nature. Through satellite remote sensing, we first identify 50 informal settlements hosting migrant workers in the strawberry production area of Southern Greece. We then apply a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) method to a subset of six informal settlements in order to evaluate their labor exploitation risks based on eight criteria. In addition to being practically implemented by a humanitarian organization and a government agency in Greece, our paper advances research on humanitarian operations and labor exploitation by elucidating how a multi-method approach can be used for data-driven prioritization of interventions against labor exploitation. Our approach offers opportunities for other applications in the field of humanitarian operations.

© 2020 The Authors. Business Strategy and Development published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd The United Kingdom's Modern Slavery Act exposed companies to a new ethical challenge in their supply chains. An estimated 40.3 million people worldwide are in modern slavery, working in a range of supply chains, including construction and facilities management. In this article, we show how the UK construction and facilities management sector responded to this challenge through an intra-industry initiative and went through a process of collaborative sense-making and sector-wide agreement on a joint approach to challenge modern slavery in the sector's operations and supply chains. The research takes an engaged research approach whereby the researchers have been able to gain deep and continued access to the phenomenon from participation in a multi-company initiative on the implementation of responses to the UK Modern Slavery Act in supply chain and procurement activities of their sector. We identify and discuss key areas for supply chain and procurement practitioners tasked with addressing a human rights topic in their operations and supply chains: Motivation, risk hot-spots, challenges and response and provide a rich understanding of an intra-industry initiative which creates a basis for further research on collective sustainability approaches by businesses who are otherwise commercial competitors. The study's results and insights are useful for policymakers and practitioners who are aiming to apply market-based approaches for sustainability improvements in supply chains.

UK legislation, in the form of the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 (hereafter SVA) and more recently the Modern Slavery Act 2015 (hereafter MSA) has begun to acknowledge the role public procurement can play in improving social sustainability. Specifically in its response to an independent review, in July 2019 the UK Government agreed that it should be subject to the same MSA transparency in supply chains requirements as businesses and that, following consultation, certain other public-sector organisations may also be required to produce an annual statement in accordance with MSA Section 54. 1 We use data from a case study of one English Local Authority (hereafter LA) to identify four types of modern slavery risk in the labour supply chains of its adult social care services: debt bondage; remuneration; recruitment and selection and occupational risk. We discuss how the theoretical model proposed by Gold, Trodd and Trautrims may be used to identify the detection and remediation capabilities required to reduce these risks and discuss some of the barriers that need to be overcome if LAs are to design legally compliant procedures.

Subcontracting represents a popular business model in supply chains across industries. In the case of hidden subcontracting, subcontractors are beyond the visible horizon of the (focal) buying firm. Hence, buyers must rely on a cascading effect for diffusing practices such as compliance with labor standards through their supply networks. Motivated by the case of the Bangladeshi garment industry, we constructed an agent-based model with buyers, first-tier suppliers, and subcontractors as agents in a supply network in order to study the impact of network characteristics on the diffusion of labor standards. Our model followed a power-based diffusion rule that emphasized the coercive power that buyers use to pressure their suppliers into adopting labor standards. This rule is a key underlying assumption of compliance-based supplier management. Hypotheses regarding power asymmetries through centrality and density of specific network components, as well as structural elements of the network, such as complexity and distance, were tested for different industry scenarios. Our analysis demonstrated that network asymmetries have ample negative effects on the adoption of labor standards, whereas complexity plays a minor role. Moreover, the impact of the tested structural determinants for sustainability diffusion was found to be contingent on specific industry types in the garment industry. This paper discusses its findings in light of previous research on subcontracting and multitier supply chain management. Among others, we highlight how subcontracting increases horizontal complexity at each supply chain tier, and how intermediaries such as sustainability nexus suppliers may crucially affect the adoption of labor standards within industries.

In this paper we argue that, to fully understand managers’ perceptions of modern slavery risk in the context of a UK health-care supply chain, it is necessary to adopt a ‘labour’ supply chain lens that puts the employment relationship at the heart of socially-sustainable supply chain management practice. The distancing and dismantling of employee relations we found, when coupled with an increase in staff turnover, may increase modern slavery risk for permanent, as well as temporary employees, close to the point of commissioning. The implications of this research for policy makers, educators, management practitioners and future research are discussed.