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.
