How can companies more effectively tackle forced labour?

The Remedy Project published a white paper on Are We Fighting Forced Labour or Just Managing It? (April 2025). This paper is part of a series of publications that the Remedy Project is launching to rethink forced labour risk assessments, focusing on prevention and improving remediation outcomes. Through this series, the Remedy Project invites brands, policymakers, NGOs, worker representatives, academic researchers, human rights experts, and industry practitioners to engage with the findings and contribute to a broader dialogue on eradicating forced labour by tackling root causes.

Human Level’s Take:

🚩 Most forced labour assessments miss the bigger picture. They focus on surface-level symptoms—like excessive overtime or withheld wages—using the International Labour Organization’s indicators. These tools often operate in isolation, missing the structural drivers that create fertile ground for exploitation.

🔍 Forced labour doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Wage suppression, excessive overtime, weak governance, and insecure work are often interconnected—and overlooked—despite being central to the problem. A narrow focus on individual symptoms means we risk treating the effects, not the cause.

💼 Even everyday business practices can fuel exploitation. Research shows that five common purchasing practices—contract terms, technical specs, order and lead times, pricing and market dominance, and demands for social standards—can directly contribute to forced labour risks.

📣 The Remedy Project is calling for a major reset. We need a holistic approach that:

1. Investigates how business practices and the absence of decent work—like fair pay, job security and worker voice—create risks.
2. Shares responsibility across the value chain, including companies, policymakers, and civil society.
3. Applies socioeconomic analysis to uncover root causes.
4. Reframes forced labour as a systemic issue—requiring proactive prevention, not just reactive detection.

⚠️ So what should companies do? Stop treating forced labour as isolated supplier misconduct. Start seeing it as the product of systemic pressures. This means:

• Reflecting on how pricing, lead times, and employment conditions may be driving harm.
• Working with peers, governments, and civil society to tackle the root causes together.
• Moving beyond checklist audits to proactive, preventative action—rooted in shared accountability.

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Some key takeaways:

• The prevalence of forced labour: Forced labour remains a persistent issue in global supply chains, with its roots extending far beyond individual supplier misconduct. It stems from deeper systemic drivers embedded within global production models such as supply chain power dynamics, institutional and regulatory failures, limitations in corporate governance and broader socio-economic factors. For instance, cost pressures, opaque subcontracting arrangements and rapid delivery can incentivise exploitative labour practices. The risk of forced labour may arise as early as the procurement stage, with exploitative practices continuing as production is outsourced through intermediaries, where regulations and worker protections may be weak. In addition, governance gaps like a lack of regulatory enforcement, limited grievance mechanisms and insufficient social security can heighten workers’ vulnerability and create conditions where exploitative practices can take place. In short, forced labour is not just a result of supplier misconduct. It is influenced by purchasing practices, gaps in legal enforcement, governance issues and socio-economic considerations.

• Current forced labour assessments are limited: Current assessments rely heavily on the International Labour Organization’s forced labour indicators, which identify symptoms like excessive overtime or withheld wages. However, used in isolation, these tools often overlook the broader structural drivers of forced labour, limiting their overall effectiveness. Focusing solely on individual indicators means that various underlying factors of forced labour and their interactions with each other, such as wage suppression, excessive overtime, governance gaps, and precarious employment, are often overlooked even though they create conditions conducive to exploitation. For instance, five key purchasing practices (i.e., contract clauses, technical specifications, order placement and lead times, prices and market power, and requests for social standards) are shown to contribute to exploitative conditions. More specifically, power asymmetries in buyer-supplier relationships means that many suppliers are accepting orders at prices that do not cover production costs. In addition, codes of conduct and corporate social responsibility initiatives are designed as a framework that provide tools for identifying and addressing forced labour. However, these frameworks can sometimes be inconsistent with purchasing practices which can undermine their effectiveness in preventing exploitation of workers. Furthermore, socio-economic factors such as poverty, lack of viable employment alternatives, structural inequalities, and weak labour protections are underlying conditions that contribute to forced labour, which makes distinguishing between direct coercion and economic desperation difficult and highlights the need for broader socio-economic analysis when assessing for forced labour. As a result, when workers endure exploitative conditions due to the combination of poverty, lack of alternatives, or structural inequalities, it can often go unnoticed because these conditions do not meet all the formal indicators of forced labour as defined by international frameworks.

• A new framework that may be better suited to preventing forced labour: To address forced labour more comprehensively, the paper provides suggestions for a new framework that 1) shifts the focus from merely identifying the presence of forced labour indicators to examining business model indicators (such as purchasing practices and the fragmentation of supply chains) and the absence of decent work conditions (which encompasses fair wages, job security, freedom of association, and access to grievance mechanisms); 2) integrates “attribution of responsibility” for a more equitable allocation of responsibility for forced labour across the value chain, reflecting the roles of brands, policymakers and other relevant actors in contributing to conditions that are conducive to forced labour. This aligns with calls for collective accountability that highlight industry-wide standards, multistakeholder collaboration and cost-sharing models to address systemic risks like forced labour; 3) integrates socio-economic analyses which goes beyond looking at static measurements to capture the drivers that lead to exploitative working conditions. The static nature of current forced labour assessments tend to treat forced forced labour as a fixed concept that can be detected through checklist-style applications of isolated indicators, which overlooks nuanced and systemic forms of coercion that do not fit neatly into predefined categories; and 4) reframes forced labour as a symptom of deeper systemic issues, which shifts the focus from reactive detection to proactive prevention. In addition, shifting remediation efforts toward tackling systemic issues - such as designing grievance mechanisms and integrating root cause analyses - can strengthen corrective action and enhance worker agency and empowerment.

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