Academic Study: “Over 50 million people in the world live in a situation of modern slavery, the most extreme form of labour exploitation…”

“[The Fair Food Program] is unique in the sense that it has been developed and deployed by the workers themselves and has gained a wide acceptance among buyers and farmers. It therefore follows a truly sustainable approach because it is not dependent on some CSR goodwill…”

“To conclude, we can answer our research question as follows. We find that a well-designed programme using market-based incentives has a strong potential to jointly combat modern slavery and bring positive change to an industry.”

The growing consensus among human rights experts and academics in support of the Fair Food Program — and the Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) model more broadly — as the only proven model for protecting human rights in corporate supply chains just added a new study to its number, this time in the form of a publication in the International Journal of Production Economics from a multi-national team of researchers with members from the University of Kassel in Germany, the University of North Florida, and the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, on the FFP’s successful efforts to combat forced labor.

The study employs a highly complex, “agent-based model” of analysis looking at several possible factors — farm size, buyer size, and the nature of the human rights crisis that helps motivate industry actors to embrace calls for reform — to explain the success of the Fair Food Program in fighting forced labor in corporate supply chains, and to identify ways in which other worker communities can replicate that success in their own workplaces and the industries where they work.  They conclude:

… (W)e can answer our research question as follows. We find that a well-designed programme using market-based incentives has a strong potential to jointly combat modern slavery and bring positive change to an industry. We show that the market structure in the industry has a strong impact on the adoption of anti-slavery programs. The quickest adoption occurs when there are few large farmers and buyers, and when the buyer size is heterogeneous. However, when the farmer size is heterogeneous (i.e., few large and many small farmers), the adoption of the programme is slower. We also find that speed is of essence in the success of such anti-slavery programs. It is important for the organisation protecting worker rights (e.g., CIW) to reach the tipping point where most actors join before it runs out of resources. To speed up this process, it may use multipliers, i.e., influential actors that will incentivize others to join the program. In doing so, it should focus its efforts on large buyers, because these actors will lead other actors to adopt the program. Applying these insights will help an organisation replicate the success of the FFP in a different context.

 

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