Non-judicial grievance mechanisms are integral to corporate human rights due diligence, yet they often fail to fulfil their promise. Too frequently, grievance mechanisms do not effectively serve the workers and communities they are designed to protect, despite their potential to drive life-changing improvements. This article examines how integrating local worker representation can create effective grievance mechanisms, using the Dindigul Agreement to End Gender-Based Violence and Harassment as a case study. With a community-based trade union at its core, the Dindigul Agreement grievance mechanism functions as an equitable enforcement tool that strengthens company–community relations, promotes human rights, and provides a framework for preventing and remedying forced labour risks within supply chains. This article is meant to provide an instructive example of how meaningful stakeholder engagement can act as a catalyst for more effective grievance mechanisms. Furthermore, it can serve as inspiration for practitioners and scholars seeking to confront forced labour and other systemic labour rights abuses by prioritising local voices and lived realities in the implementation of due diligence obligations.
Countries, primarily in the Global North, have been implementing transparency and corporate sustainability due diligence laws. These laws seek to increase corporate accountability for various human rights, environmental, and modern slavery offences in global supply chains. Three legislative models have been adopted: 1) Disclosure or Transparency laws; 2) Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence (MHRDD) laws; and 3) MHRDD laws with civility liability, which is considered best practice. In this article, I evaluate the factors that influenced the adoption of a particular legislative model in various countries and specifically examine what factors influenced the passage of transparency legislation in Canada. I argue that despite international pressure on Canada to enact legislation, it was ultimately features of Canada’s domestic political economy that determined the enactment of a transparency law. These features include Canada’s membership of the Anglosphere, its powerful mining industry, the advocacy of civil society organisations, key parliamentarians, and ruling political party principles.
In contrast to existing guidance frameworks for due diligence that focus on global firms describing their programmes (inputs), in this article, we argue that quantitative data on labour outcomes are required to hold global firms to account for human rights harms in their supply chains. We present twenty-five metrics that measure both lead firm sourcing practices and supplier firm labour rights and working conditions. We argue that these metrics are useful for regulators to assess how lead firms covered under due diligence legislation are addressing human rights harms in their supply chains. In addition, they are particularly useful to lead firms themselves in order to assess the level and salience of risks.
Within anti-forced labour circles, there has been considerable excitement lately about governments taking on a more active role in tackling forced labour in supply chains. A common perspective is that after over 25 years of failed corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts, governments have re-entered the arena; states’ enactment of responsive legislation (e.g. due diligence legislation or transparency legislation), import bans, and multi-lateral efforts, including through the G7, are often heralded as evidence of their stepping up. However, the extent to which this wave of government initiatives reinforces and relies upon, rather than replaces, CSR is frequently overlooked. In this article, I consider the ways in which recent government initiatives to tackle forced labour in supply chains expand the market, role, and governance power of unaccountable private actors, including auditing firms, data analytics and Artificial Intelligence companies, and certification bodies. I argue that unless governments enact far more ambitious regulation and restrictions on multinational enterprises, we are heading for another 25 years of deficient and inadequate private-led governance to address forced labour in supply chains.
‘Employer Pays Principle’ (EPP) responsible recruitment policies of multinational enterprises (MNEs) aim to reduce risks of forced labour in supply chains by requiring all costs of labour recruitment to be borne by employers, not workers. Based on in-depth interviews with almost 4,000 foreign migrant workers in Japan, Malaysia, and Thailand conducted between 2020 and 2025, this paper investigates how effectively EPP policies were implemented across supply chains. Less than ten per cent of respondents experienced truly zero-fees recruitment. All others had to pay some or all of the costs of recruitment up front, with 14.6 per cent being indebted in the process, and only 12.2 per cent ever receiving reimbursement for some or all fees paid. When significant recruitment fees were discovered, most suppliers resisted reimbursing the full amount. Most MNEs were not willing to require the full amount be repaid to affected workers, nor share the reimbursement costs. The paper concludes by calling on MNEs to adopt more responsible contracting practices to make EPP recruitment possible by suppliers; share responsibility for reimbursing recruitment fees to impacted workers in their supply chains; and consider as not EPP-compliant suppliers employing workers who have paid recruitment fees, even if they reimburse them later.
This article presents a case study of a wildcat strike by lorry drivers that took place in the Gräfenhausen rest area in Germany, in 2023, in order to explore the potential of the German Supply Chain Act (GSCA) and similar laws to combat labour exploitation and activate collective action by migrant workers. Despite adverse circumstances, the successful strike showed that supply chain laws can unveil exploitation. The case demonstrates the emergence of collective agency through the supply chain approach. Vulnerable migrant workers are susceptible to exploitation due to socioeconomic and legal circumstances, and they are, in general, unlikely to successfully claim their rights. The success of the Gräfenhausen strike resulted from building social relations, a broad network of supporters, and the strategic use of the GSCA to pressure companies at the end of the supply chain to pay outstanding wages. Such supply chain laws provide important resources for social actors addressing exploitation as a human rights issue and transforming exploited workers into rights holders. The Gräfenhausen case underscores the essential role of solidarity and collective support alongside legal mechanisms for the successful enforcement of rights.
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.
This article highlights two global supply chain agreements to tackle gender-based violence and harassment in the garment industry—the Dindigul Agreement to Eliminate Gender-Based Violence and Harassment in India (2022), and the Central Java Agreement for Gender Justice in Indonesia (2025). The article is grounded in my experience negotiating and implementing both agreements. Drawing on and contributing to feminist theoretical advances in industrial relations, I argue that effective anti-GBVH supply chain agreements in the garment industry must be founded in freedom of association and embedded within labour movement ecosystems. I introduce the concept of labour movement ecosystem as a framework for analysing labour movement organisations and interrelationships, and the resulting impact and interactions within global supply chains, leading up to the signing and implementation of such agreements.
Review of the book Advocacy, Inc. INGOs and the Business of “Modern Slavery” by Stephanie A. Limoncelli, Stanford University Press, 2026, ISBN: 9781503644823.
Peru has developed an extensive 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. In practice, however, at least 20 per cent of logging is illegal (and up to 86 per cent in some areas), around 70 per cent of companies are informal, and there is repeated evidence of labour exploitation and forced labour. This article explores the relationship between these elements through a systematic review of regulatory and corporate frameworks, interviews with timber workers in Amazonian river ports, and an expert panel analysis. The findings reveal not so much a system of control as one that simulates control: a dense institutional framework that is highly permeable to illegal flows, a traceability scheme that looks modern but lacks accountability, and a trade chain that ultimately relies on a forest regent, a notebook, and a pen. In short, the Peruvian timber sector presents a paradox of international regulatory frameworks and enforcement weaknesses, where compliance is more often performed than achieved.
This paper discusses worker-centred approaches to the identification of and response to labour violations in the supply chains of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Drawing on examples from Southeast Asia, it highlights how meaningful engagement with workers and collaborative partnerships benefit both business and workers by fostering learning and systemic improvements. The paper concludes that MNEs should move beyond traditional audit-based models and adopt strategies that prioritise worker involvement, transparency, and long-term accountability.
A just transition requires climate measures to be implemented in a way that engages and protects affected and vulnerable people and communities. However, due to the prevalence of modern slavery in global renewable energy supply Region being subjected to state-sanctioned forced labour at various stages of the solar supply chain, the transition to net zero is currently unjust. This paper examines whether Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD) can be strengthened in Australia to better protect workers in solar value chains, and thus, more effectively support a just transition. By considering a case study of one of Australia's most prominent energy companies, AGL Energy Limited, this paper highlights the gaps in stakeholder engagement and in the identification of a broad range of human rights and environmental risks and impacts along the value chain. This case study also highlights the limitations of HRDD to protect rightsholders located in places with state-sanctioned forced labour programmes. The paper contends that for Australia to credibly position itself as a global leader in addressing modern slavery while advancing its transition to net zero, this aspiration must be underpinned by substantive legislative reform and enhanced regulatory measures to effectively support a just transition.
Although both climate change and child marriage have received sustained policy and research attention, their intersection remains critically underexplored. This article examines how climate stress—arising from rapid-onset disasters and slow-onset processes such as drought and salinisation, and intensified by displacement and weak governance—reshapes marriage practices in South Asia, where climate vulnerability and gendered precarity converge with particular intensity. Drawing on ethnographic research in drought-affected western India and case studies from the Indo-Bangladesh border, southern India, and Afghanistan documented through the Climate Brides project, the paper traces how child marriage functions as an infrastructure of adaptation—a mechanism for redistributing labour, debt, and care under conditions of crisis. Across cases—from Gate-Cane weddings in Maharashtra to trafficking-linked unions in the Sundarbans, post-tsunami marriages in Tamil Nadu, and Toyana exchanges in Afghan displacement camps—early and forced marriage emerge not as cultural residues but as adaptive, if extractive, responses to livelihood erosion and the retreat of state support. Using feminist political ecology and social reproduction theory, the article calls for interdisciplinary, justice-oriented approaches that recognise child marriage as part of the gendered infrastructures of climate adaptation.
Climate change has disproportionate effects on the most disadvantaged communities and households, but the ways in which individuals and households respond to extreme weather events is not yet fully clear. This paper uses the adaptive preferences framework to better understand decision-making processes among individuals and households struggling to cope with the effects of extreme weather events. Drawing on 755 household surveys and 74 qualitative engagements, it argues that, as climate change limits livelihood options, individuals and households make conscious decisions to undertake risky migration. Climate limits current earnings, pushes households to sell productive assets, and erodes community infrastructure; in doing so, it constrains individual and household well-being. In response to these increasing limitations, individuals and households consciously accept the risks associated with migration journeys to access potential short- and long-term benefits. Specific groups, including women, face potentially more damaging adaptive preferences due to pre-existing structural and cultural barriers such as lower literacy and levels of documentation. While government investments to support climate adaptation are partially successful, they do not fully reach the most vulnerable populations. Government actors must develop a better understanding of the choices faced by disadvantaged households, and create flexible risk mitigation measures on long-term initiatives that are already trusted by communities. The paper concludes that adoption of the adaptive preferences framework by policymakers can improve the effectiveness of programmes designed to support climate adaptation and reduce vulnerability.
This Editorial introduces a Special Issue of the Anti-Trafficking Review that analyses the links between climate change, migration, and exploitative labour. It documents some of the deteriorating climate-induced labour conditions and outlines the main arguments made in the Special Issue contributions. It concludes with several recommendations for future research and possible actions to protect workers on a heating planet.
This article explores the intersection of climate change, mobility, and gender in the Madhesh Province of Nepal, with a particular focus on the experiences of Maithili Dalit women, based on 19 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2024. It highlights how international labour migration, primarily undertaken by men, serves as a crucial survival strategy for families, while women remain behind to manage the household in the face of poverty and increasing climate risks. Utilising an intersectional approach, the article argues that (im)mobile Maithili Dalit women face poverty-induced vulnerabilities, which are amplified by climate change. Consequently, migration becomes a strategy for coping with these poverty-induced vulnerabilities. Privileging the voices and stories of Maithili Dalit women, the article attempts to understand those who are affected by climate change and international migration but are often absent from the political conversation and decision-making processes in a globalised world.
In this short article, we explore what needs to be in place for the workers and communities in the Brazilian state of Amazonas to resist slave labour in areas that have recently opened up routes to deforestation, cattle ranching, and mining. Drawing from community-based work in several remote locations in Amazonas state, including individual interviews and discussions with community groups, we argue that long-term work by trusted local organisations, aiming to curb structural violence at community level, is vital, enabling local residents to visibilise the problem of forced labour and slavery-like practices and prompt actions by statutory bodies to protect workers and the environment.
One of the special issue guest editors, Denise Brennan, conducted this interview with David Feingold to learn more about his experience of witnessing the impact of climate change and ecological changes on people’s lives and livelihoods in Southeast Asia.
This article envisions new approaches to worker protections on a heated planet. As worksites become increasingly hazardous, legal frameworks that regulate workplace standards as well as provide protections for forced labourers do not account—as of yet—for the heightened risks they face due to climate change. The article calls for the re-evaluation of the socio-legal dimensions of forced labour as climate-altered working conditions worsen. It focuses on three under-examined populations who labour in sectors exceptionally burdened by the climate catastrophe in the United States: undocumented migrants, H-2A and H-2B visa recipients, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals. These workers labour through excruciatingly hot temperatures, dismal air quality, and toxic pesticides often with no protective gear or water or shade breaks. They also do ‘disaster work’ by preparing for and cleaning up after fires, hurricanes, and floods. The authors consider if the worst of worsening working conditions constitute forced labour and conclude by outlining protections and remedies that workers have been demanding.
All people inhabit the same world, but global warming and subsequent climate adversities do not affect everyone in the same way. People who are already marginalised due to aspects of their identity—race, religion, age, gender, or ability—face compounded vulnerabilities. With a particular focus on elderly people and people with disabilities, this short article presents cases of three families who live in villages spread across the southwestern borderlands of Bangladesh while coping with a less predictable climate. It draws connections between their experiences with erratic climate patterns that collide with structural inequity and social injustice.
