How can multinationals avoid forced labour and modern slavery in their supply chains?

Details

Supervisors

Denis, Sabine

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Since the publication of the UN Guiding Principles, business and human rights has become an increasingly important topic. For instance, the recent accidents in the garment industry have enhanced the civil society’s demand that multinationals respect human rights. For these reasons, this thesis aims at answering the following question; “How can multinationals avoid forced labour and modern slavery in their supply chains?”. In order to do so, the paper is divided into two main parts. The first one gathers, on the one hand, definitions of the concepts of modern slavery, forced labour and decent work. On the other hand, an overview of the most important human rights related risks of global supply chains is given. For example, growing complexity and geographical scattering of the chains have increased the risks to find forced labour and modern slavery in a company's activities. Aside from this, the existing tools to address those risks are exposed according to the “Protect. Respect. Remedy” structure of the UN Guiding Principles. With this in mind, the OECD has pushed forward important guidelines to help multinationals establish efficient due diligence processes. The second part of the paper is focused on a practical case study of the global batteries supply chain. The latter gathers an overview of the geography of the chain and its bottleneck components (i.e. cobalt and lithium). After that, based on the risks exposed in the first part of the research, the threats for human rights specific to the batteries are presented. Then, the Belgian multinational Umicore is studied as well as its answers to the identified risks. Finally, in accordance with everything that was analysed in the paper, recommendations are formulated to help multinationals avoid forced labour and modern slavery in their supply chains. On top of that Umicore’s methods to do so are critically discussed. Overall, this paper gives first hints for companies that wish to be more socially responsible. Nevertheless, seeing the tremendous amount of work that still has to be done, further research on the efficiency of several tools will be necessary.