Worker Protection in Supply Chains Needs Attention

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from being in a room full of people who care deeply about a problem, and realising the problem persists anyway. That tension sat just beneath the surface of the 2025 Responsible Sourcing and Ethical Trade Forum in London, where practitioners from across sectors convened to examine what genuinely moves the needle on supply chain human rights.

The sessions were candid, sometimes difficult, and consistently practical. Across two days of discussions, two themes emerged with particular force: the urgent need to centre workers’ lived experience rather than audit outputs, and the limits of what any single company can achieve without pre-competitive collaboration. Neither is a new observation. The value of the discussion was in interrogating why progress remains slow. And where the real points of leverage lie.

Workers at the centre

The session on empowering workers and improving supply chain transparency opened with a premise that sounds straightforward but is rarely reflected in practice: that supplier engagement should start with understanding what suppliers and workers need, not what a brand’s compliance framework requires them to demonstrate.

Proof-of-concept programmes that iterate over time to measure turnover, productivity and wellbeing, were highlighted as a more honest indicator of progress than point-in-time audits. Anchoring on mental and physical health was identified as a priority that most businesses still treat as peripheral. The attendees were frank about a structural obstacle: when client–supplier dialogue is confined to compliance documentation, the relationship narrows to a transaction, and real insight about working conditions becomes harder to surface.

The responsible recruitment session sharpened this further. The room broadly agreed that remediation in migrant worker contexts has been too narrowly focused on reimbursing recruitment fees – important, but insufficient. Preventing repetition of harm requires engaging with root causes: why workers are in vulnerable positions to begin with, what structural conditions create markets for exploitative recruitment, and what role governments, brands and industry bodies each play in shaping those conditions.

The honest assessment was that the sector is not yet doing enough of this work. Recruitment cost data rarely reaches procurement teams in a form that meaningfully influences sourcing decisions. That gap between the evidence that exists and the decisions that get made, came up repeatedly across sessions.

Collaboration as infrastructure, not aspiration

There was animated discussion in a session on human rights impact assessments, where participants identified industry collaboration not as a nice-to-have but as the mechanism through which transformation at scale becomes possible. The honest acknowledgement was that most companies are conducting human rights assessments (HRAs) in isolation, duplicating effort and stopping short of the shared action that would make findings meaningful.

Getting internal leadership buy-in early was cited as a precondition for any of this working. Not to tick a governance box, but because an HRA without executive commitment becomes an exercise in documentation rather than a driver of change. The attendees’ view was that HRAs are most powerful when they are explicitly framed as business transformation tools, and when the levers they identify are connected to clear accountability.

A strategic supplier engagement session offered a different but complementary angle. Discussion of working with B Corps and social enterprises in supply chains revealed that very few companies in the room were doing this knowingly. Many saw it as a significant, underexplored opportunity. The argument was not simply ethical: co-created products that draw on community skills create quality differentiation for consumers.

It also engages commercial teams and builds supplier relationships with a fundamentally different character. Procurement strategy, including preferential payment terms and genuine capacity-building, was identified as the practical instrument through which this intent becomes real.

Knowing-doing gap

Across sessions, a consistent pattern emerged. In responsible recruitment, the information about true recruitment costs exists, but it isn’t reaching the people who set sourcing budgets. In remediation, the principle that difficult conversations are the preventative ones is widely understood, but the conversations are still being avoided. In supplier partnerships, the case for deeper engagement is well-made, but most procurement strategies haven’t caught up.

The climate and resilience session offered perhaps the most grounded framing of this dynamic. Working on the ground is messy. Flexibility and readiness to adapt are not soft skills, they are operational requirements. The framing that resonated most in that session was the shift from impact to resilience. Positioning responsible sourcing not as a cost of doing business but as the foundation of long-term commercial stability for brands, producers and farming communities alike.

That reframe of responsibility as resilience was the closest thing to a unifying thread across the conference discussions. It doesn’t resolve the harder questions about accountability, root causes or the limits of voluntary action. But it offers a way into conversations with internal stakeholders who are not yet persuaded by the ethical case alone.

What now?

The questions the forum raised are not ones that resolve between annual gatherings. But they do benefit from the kind of structured, off-the-record space that allows practitioners to move past the polished case study and into the genuinely hard problems. The conversation continues at the Responsible Sourcing and Ethical Trade Forum, returning to London on 18–19 March 2026. If the 2025 forum was a diagnosis, 2026 is where the sector can be more deliberate about the cure.

This article draws on session discussions from the 2025 Responsible Sourcing and Ethical Trade Forum. Sessions were conducted under Chatham House rules. For details of the upcoming 2026 forum click here.