Header Photo Credit: Mikael Blomkvist _Pexels
Key Points:
- Companies use grievance mechanisms and social audits as two pillars of a robust worker-driven social compliance strategy. The most effective grievance mechanisms are implemented and maintained with workers and their unions who can negotiate solutions to identified problems.
- Grievance mechanism: An established, transparent system that aims for peaceful resolution of conflict by an institutionalized mechanism that alleviates workers’ fear of reprisal from employers. It is critical that workers without the protection of an effective union and bargaining agreement have whistleblower protections that empower them to safely report serious concerns to management.
- Social Audit: The process of examining a specific worksite’s compliance with the standards set in the company’s Code of Conduct. Auditing uncovers problems; it does not solve problems. It is one piece of the larger worker-driven social compliance system.
- Effective grievance mechanisms should be legitimate, accessible, predictable, equitable, transparent, rights-compatible, a source of continuous learnings, and based on dialogue and engagement.
- Grievance mechanisms must provide some means of dispute remediation or settlement.
- Social auditing is a useful tool to assess compliance at a particular point in time and should not be used as the only process for determining the prevalence of forced or child labor in a supply chain. Audits should be tailored to a code of conduct and the local context. They must also specifically focus on labor rights and be used with the intention of remediating identified issues.
Key Topics
Examples in Action
A feedback mechanism that relies on technology and keeps users anonymous.
A grievance procedure that involves working with the supplier and an independent organization to develop a time-bound action and remediation plan.
Groups are turning more to technology, especially mobile phones, to collect worker feedback.
A project with the ILO and IFC for governments, companies and workers to come together to improve working conditions in the garment industry.
Provides detailed guidance on both improving victim situations and preventing recurrence of child labor when found in a manufacturing environment.
Assesses working conditions at hazelnut farms to find child labor. Companies remediate this by building schools and provide scholarships for children of migrant workers.
This project helps businesses establish systems to prevent, detect, and eliminate child labor and other forms of labor exploitation from their supply chains, and it is assembling a powerful coalition of coffee buyers to collectively incentivize suppliers into compliance.
The project aims to extend multi-stakeholder transparency and traceability systems to the lower tiers in the garment sector to improve working conditions of child and adult homeworkers in India, Nepal, and Pakistan as part of the apparel and footwear supply chains.
Further Resources
- Combating Forced Labour: A Handbook for Employers and Business. [Online, accessed January, 2015].
- Eliminating and Preventing Forced Labour: Checkpoints. [Online, accessed March 1, 2016].
- LeBaron, Genevieve and Jane Lister. Ethical Audits and the Supply Chains of Global Corporations. Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. January 2016.
- Remediation Guidance for Victims of Exploitation in Extended Minerals Supply Chains. April 2018.
- Report on Remediation of forced labor under the Tariff Act of 1930. May 2023.
