Business Fights Poverty
Business Fights Poverty
Business Fights Poverty
To ensure a resilient world economy that will sustain a Covid-19 recovery conducive to social progress, governments must now take decisive legislative action, according to a new ITUC report.
The ITUC report, ‘Towards mandatory due diligence in global supply chains’, shows that while all governments need to bring in mandatory human rights’ due diligence legislation, EU-wide legislation and a UN Treaty on Business and Human Rights are important steps to regulate the behaviour of companies with regard to their entire operations and activities globally.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of global supply chains and the enormous risks to human and labour rights in a highly interconnected global economy that is not governed by the rule of law.
With the global drop in demand as a result of the pandemic, many companies resorted to abruptly ending the procurement of goods and services and even to defaulting on prior commitments with a disastrous impact for workers in global supply chains.
As the coronavirus spread, years of voluntary corporate social responsibility vanished overnight. In the absence of an appropriate regulatory framework, global companies were able to evade responsibilities for the workers who produced the goods and provided the services that allowed them to generate enormous profits. This must never be allowed to happen again.
In Bangladesh more than half of garment suppliers reported that they had their in-process or completed production cancelled, which led to massive job losses and workers getting furloughed. More than 98 per cent of buyers refused to contribute to the cost of paying the partial wages to furloughed workers required under national law. 72 per cent of furloughed workers were sent home without pay.
Mandatory due diligence legislation would, for the first time, give workers a legal framework to seek redress wherever their employer resides and prevent companies from evading their responsibilities to their workers, society and the planet.
‘Towards mandatory due diligence in global supply chains' makes eight recommendations for effective due diligence at the domestic level, based on an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of existing legislation by Professor Oliver De Schutter for the ITUC.
Companies cannot make a positive contribution to achieving the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) if they continue to infringe human and labour rights with their business models and activities.
National legislation as well as effective due diligence practices by companies are key to achieve the SDGs and for sustainable supply chains and trade.
With the rule of law, we can ensure that the global economy, after the disruption of COVID-19, is resilient, conducive to social progress and puts people and planet first.
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