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Regulation & Governance (2017) ••, ••–••
doi:10.1111/rego.12162
Governance gaps in eradicating forced labor: From global to
domestic supply chains
Andrew Crane
*
School of Management, University of Bath, UK
Genevieve LeBaron
Department of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK
Jean Allain
Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia; Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Emancipation, University of Hull, UK
Laya Behbahani
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Abstract
A growing body of scholarship analyzes the emergence and resilience of forced labor in developing countries within global value
chains. However, little is known about how forced labor arises within domestic supply chains concentrated within national borders,
producing products for domestic consumption. We conduct one of the first studies of forced labor in domestic supply chains,
through a cross-industry comparison of the regulatory gaps surrounding forced labor in the United Kingdom. We find that
understanding the dynamics of forced labor in domestic supply chains requires us to conceptually modify the global value chain
framework to understand similarities and differences across these contexts. We conclude that addressing the governance gaps that
surround forced labor will require scholars and policymakers to carefully refine their thinking about how we might design operative
governance that effectively engages with local variation.
Keywords: global supply chain, modern slavery, forced labor, global value chain, governance, domestic public policy.
1. Introduction
Over the last two decades, the global value chain (GVC) theoretical framework has been deployed to analyze the drivers
of labor exploitation in the global economy and the governance gaps that facilitate it.1 Beginning with Hopkins and
Wallerstein’s (1977) early use of the global commodity chain concept to theorize the changing international division
of labor in the late 1970s, the GVC framework has been at the heart of scholarly efforts to understand the impact of
economic globalization on labor standards. An important blind spot in the literature, however, concerns the dynamics
of labor exploitation in domestic supply chains. The prevailing emphasis has been on the reorganization of production
into supply chains feeding worldwide markets, and particularly on the challenges and opportunities created for workers
in export-oriented sectors in the developing world. However, shifting global relations of production and the rise of
buyer-driven chains have also impacted working conditions in supply chains geared toward domestic consumption
and local markets. This is true in both developed and developing country contexts.
This lacuna is notable in the recent body of GVC scholarship tackling contemporary forced labor. Indeed, one of
the most urgent problems in research on supply chains today concerns the question of how far and in what ways the
reorganization of production is fueling the use of forced labor by industry. In this article, we utilize the internationally
recognized definition of forced labor, first put forward by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in its 1930
Forced Labour Convention (ILO 1930), which reads:
Correspondence: Andrew Crane, School of Management, University of Bath. Email: a.w.crane@bath.ac.uk
Accepted for publication 07 May 2017.
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A. Crane et al.
Forced labor in domestic supply chains
‘forced or compulsory labor’ shall mean all work or service which is exacted under menace of any penalty for its
non-performance and for which the worker concerned does not offer himself voluntarily.2
The definition excludes military conscription, penal labor, emergency assistance, and communal service from
consideration as forced labor.
While there is a long arc of activity that can be considered forced labor, both domestic and international courts have
focused on fundamental deprivations of liberty or violence to compel labor (Allain 2015).3 The United Kingdom’s
(UK’s) first successful prosecution of individuals for compelling forced labor under Section 71 of the Coroners and
Justice Act 2009 (R. v. Connors and Ors, EWCA 324, 2014) found that workers were paid as little as £5 a day for hard
labor, and were subjected to violent punishment and discipline.4 Although there is insufficient data to conclusively
establish that forced labor is growing,5 it is widely believed by policymakers, the media, the public, and even some
industry leaders to be accelerating alongside processes of economic globalization.
Scholars have begun to mobilize the GVC framework to analyze forced labor and inform policy, but have tended to
focus on forced labor associated with global markets, and especially, forced labor located in the developing world. For
instance, recent studies have documented the business demand for forced labor in industries including gold, electronics,
coffee, and fishing (Richardson 2009; Bishkek 2013; Verité 2014a) across countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and
have elucidated pressures toward severe exploitation generated through high levels of subcontracting (Mosley 2011),
uneven value distribution (Crane 2013), the presence of labor contractors (Barrientos 2013), and “adverse incorporation”
(Phillips 2013) into GVCs. Without doubt, these studies have yielded important insights about the dynamics of forced
labor in global supply chains, and have helped to inform public and private governance initiatives to combat it.
However, the burgeoning literature on forced labor in supply chains has left two important problems unresolved.
First, the focus on GVCs instead of domestic supply chains has made it unclear whether and to what extent forced labor
is actually associated with production for export rather than local consumption. Is forced labor more closely linked to
GVCs than domestic supply chains, or has the former simply received greater attention to date? Second, because the
literature has tended to depict forced labor in GVCs as a “developing country” problem, it is not clear whether and
how the framework could be used to understand forced labor in developed country settings. Given that forced labor
also occurs in developed countries, can the same framework be applied?
The importance of addressing these twin shortcomings is underscored by mounting evidence that, in addition to
GVCs, forced labor also occurs within domestic supply chains in both developed and developing countries (Andrees
& Belser 2009; Allain et al. 2013). From forced labor on Florida farms growing tomatoes for consumption across the
United States (Greenhouse 2014) to trafficking and forced labor associated with tea grown in Assam primarily for
Indian consumption (Chamberlain 2014), there is an urgent need to understand the supply chain dynamics
surrounding incidents of forced labor in domestic supply chains. By many accounts, this is occurring in both developed
and developing country settings, and is particularly true of supply chains that are spatially fixed and cannot be
outsourced overseas – such as construction, agriculture, care work, and service sectors (Free the Slaves & UC Berkeley
Human Rights Center 2004; Scott et al. 2012).
Although forced labor is generally considered to have long been prohibited in developed countries, a recent study
by the ILO indicates that it continues to play a role and is most profitable in these settings. Developed economies have
the highest annual profit rates per victim of forced labor, by a factor of three (International Labour Organization [ILO]
2014). While the annual profit per victim was estimated at US$3,900 in Africa and US$5,000 in the Asia-Pacific region,
it was estimated at US$34,800 in developed countries. Profits from forced labor in developed countries thus make a
substantial contribution to the $150 billion in illegal profits that the ILO estimates is derived from forced labor in
the private economy every year (ILO 2014). Yet, in spite of the growing significance of forced labor in developed
countries, the supply chain dynamics surrounding this form of severe exploitation have largely been overlooked.
This article seeks to fill these two gaps, by looking at domestic supply chains and through its focus on a developed
country. Our study is grounded in empirical questions about the supply chain dynamics of forced labor in the UK, as
well as conceptual questions about whether and how the GVC framework can be modified to shed light on domestic
supply chains. Empirically, it provides one of the first in-depth qualitative studies of forced labor in domestic supply
chains in a developed country, focusing on the UK’s construction, food, and cannabis industries. A focus on the
governance of forced labor in developed countries is an important issue for the readers of Regulation & Governance
for three main reasons. First, forced labor affects a number of people in developed countries; for instance, the UK
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government estimates there are between 10,000 and 13,000 victims of forced labor within its borders (UK Home Office
2014). Second, while statistically less prominent than other forms of exploitation, forced labor and related practices like
slavery and trafficking are much worse forms of exploitation, and the persistence of severe human suffering in modern
industry warrants investigation. Third, forced labor provides a particularly interesting context to extend work on issues
of regulation and governance, including the literature on public and private interactions (Bartley 2014; Eberlein et al.
2014) and on the limits of private governance (Verbruggen 2013; Fransen & Conzelmann 2015). The historical
abolition of slavery in developed countries would seemingly make forced labor a story of effective state governance.
Yet its reemergence in the contemporary period elucidates a crucial governance gap in the industrialized world, and
points to the failure of existing public and private governance initiatives. As our study highlights, although a wave of
responsive regulation has sought to strengthen governance systems to combat forced labor over the past few years,
regulatory gaps continue to surround forced labor in both global and domestic supply chains.
To investigate the supply chain dynamics of forced labor in the domestic context, we first introduce the preliminary
GVC conceptual framework that guides our study and provide an overview of how it has been used to study forced
labor. In Section 3, we introduce our research questions and methodology, which is inductive but is guided by the
preliminary GVC conceptual framework. Section 4 describes our main findings, focusing on how our study of forced
labor in domestic supply chains in the UK requires us to conceptually modify and adapt the GVC framework, which
may serve useful to scholars and practitioners examining similar issues in other domestic settings in the future. In
Section 5, we discuss the implications of our key findings about the regulatory gaps surrounding forced labor.
2. Theorizing forced labor through the global value chain (GVC) framework
Anchored in the recognition that globalization of production and trade has reorganized large portions of the global
economy, the GVC framework pioneered by Gereffi et al. “examines the different ways in which global production
and distribution systems are integrated, and the possibilities for firms in developing countries to enhance their position
in global markets” (2005 p. 79). Because the aim of GVC research has been a holistic analysis of global industries, the
framework has rarely been extended to understand domestic industries that produce for local rather than exportoriented consumption. Nevertheless, the framework offers several important insights that serve as a preliminary
conceptual guide for our study.
The GVC framework emphasizes four key components that are needed to understand the design and functioning of
a supply chain: the input-output structure, geographical configuration, governance structure, and institutional context
(Gereffi 1994, 2014; Gereffi & Fernandez-Stark 2011). The remainder of this Section will review research that has
sought to understand forced labor through these components. In Section 4 we describe the modifications we have made
to the framework as a result of our domestic-level analysis.
2.1. Structure
The starting point of GVC analysis is to identify the key activities, actors, and segments of the chain that “brings a
product or service from initial conception to the consumer’s hands” (Gereffi & Fernandez-Stark 2011, p. 5). Described
as the “input-output structure” (Gereffi 1994), these stages of production are typically depicted as horizontal product
supply chains, with an emphasis on the input-output of physical products and services that add value as raw materials
are transformed into final products.
Several recent studies have linked the structure of GVCs to the presence of forced labor. The literature holds that a
complex and multi-tiered input-output structure is a key factor that can give rise to forced labor, as well as facilitate
labor exploitation more broadly. For instance, Phillips’ in-depth comparative study of forced labor in India and
Brazil found it to thrive along heavily outsourced portions of supply chains (Phillips 2013; Phillips et al. 2011). These
findings are confirmed by several studies suggesting that forced labor in GVCs often takes place among lower tiered
suppliers, particularly when informal or illegal subcontracting takes place (Taylor 2011; McGrath 2013; Verité 2014a,b).
2.2. Geography
The second component of GVC analysis identifies the chain’s geographic configuration. Given that a product like a
smartphone can involve production activities fragmented across dozens of national boundaries, GVC analysis is
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Forced labor in domestic supply chains
focused on the global flow of products, and tends to assume a skilled/unskilled binary between labor in the developed
and developing world. As Gereffi and Fernandez-Stark describe it, “usually developing countries offer low labor costs
and raw materials, while rich nations with highly educated talent are behind research and development and product
design” (2011, p. 7).
This assumption has been influential in shaping GVC research on forced labor. Most of the academic and policy
literature has focused on how buyers and lead firms located in the developed world impact upon workers located in
the developing world, including the labor conditions in supply chains as well as the codes and standards lead firms
introduce to address them (Locke et al. 2009; Barrientos et al. 2011; Anner et al. 2013; Lund-Thomsen & Coe 2013;
Nadvi & Raj-Reichert 2015). A key finding has been that imbalances in power, wealth, and value capture between actors
in the developed and developing world can create barriers to raising labor standards. For instance, several recent studies
have emphasized that the uneven value captured by retail and brand companies located in the global North compared
to developing world suppliers, smallholder farmers, and workers can create pressure toward exploitation, including
forced labor (Barrientos & Visser 2012; Barrientos et al. 2013).
2.3. Governance
The third component of the GVC framework relates to a chain’s governance structure, which Gereffi defines as
“authority and power relationships that determine how financial, material and human resources are allocated and flow
within a chain” (1994, p. 97). Early iterations of the framework simply differentiated between “buyer-driven” and
“supplier-driven” governance (Gereffi 1994, p. 97), but more recent work by Gereffi et al. (2005, p. 83) proposes a
five-fold typology of GVC governance structures, differentiating between markets, modular, relational, captive, and
hierarchy-based governance.
The majority of the literature on raising labor standards in GVCs – which again, tends to focus on workers in
developing country contexts (but is not limited to forced labor) – has focused on market-based forms of supply chain
governance, such as the role and effectiveness of codes of conduct, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and other forms of
business governance beyond (or in addition to) government (Fransen 2011; Locke 2013; Bartley 2014; Bartley et al.
2015). For instance, scholars have debated the legitimacy, potential, and effectiveness of global governance initiatives
to combat labor exploitation through company codes of conduct (Locke et al. 2009; Fransen 2011), ethical compliance
auditing (Locke 2013), and other forms of inspection and monitoring (O’Rourke 2003). Another interlocking body of
research has analyzed the capacity and effectiveness of global governance instruments designed to heighten labor
standards and human rights within supply chains, such as the United Nations Global Compact (Marx & Wouters 2016).
When this literature has dealt with forced labor, it has tended to approach it as a global governance issue, and more
specifically, as a challenge of engineering the right balance of public and private initiatives to address the emergence of
forced labor within multi-tiered, complex, transnational supply chains. At the global level, the literature has focused
primarily on private regulation. When attention has been paid to domestic governance, it has revolved primarily on
public regulation and the public–private intersection (Balch 2012; Waite et al. 2015).
2.4. Institutional context
The final component of the GVC framework is an analysis of the broader institutional context in which the chain
operates. Essentially, this element of the framework endeavors to understand the social, political, and economic
contexts at play in the local, national, and global levels in which chains operate and are governed (Gereffi &
Fernandez-Stark 2011, pp. 11–12).
The key underpinning assumption of much of the GVC literature on labor exploitation is the claim that national
and global political and economic structures have failed to adapt to the challenges sparked by the reorganization of
production into GVCs and that this has created what Barrientos et al. (2011, p. 310) have described as “decent work
deficits” across the developing world. Forced labor can arise in this context as a result of both the “supply” of vulnerable
workers generated by economic factors like poverty (Phillips 2013; Howard 2014), as well as the business “demand” for
forced labor that can thrive in the face of very low levels of state-based labor inspection and enforcement (Andrees &
Belser 2009; LeBaron 2014).
Recent research has also identified the presence of corruption as an important institutional factor that can impact
upon labor conditions in supply chains. This can include corruption in political or market based supply chain
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governance (e.g. double bookkeeping and bribes), as well as audit corruption. For instance, Toffel et al.’s recent study of
44,383 social audits in 47 countries found “evidence suggesting that violations recorded in audits might indeed be
influenced by financial conflicts of interest and by auditor competence” (2015, p.16).
3. Research questions and methodology
The GVC framework as applied to forced labor offers an important conceptual framework to explore forced labor in
the domestic context. The dimensions of structure, geography, governance, and institutional context provided the
contours around which we developed and responded to our research questions in our empirical investigation. That
is, the core research question driving our empirical research was: In what ways is forced labor in domestic supply chains
similar and different to what is predicted by the GVC literature? Specifically, we sought to explore these similarities and
differences in relation to structure, geography, governance, and institutional context.
Our empirical research focused on forced labor in the UK. We chose the UK as our domestic case study for three
reasons. First, the UK government was in the midst of introducing a Modern Slavery Act, which helps us understand
the current governance context and challenges surrounding forced labor. Second, given the UK has prosecuted forced
labor under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, there is a reliable body of secondary data. Finally, we were able to
identify comparable industrial sectors in the UK, covered by public and private governance initiatives. Throughout
the study, we deployed a narrow conceptualization of forced labor in order to ensure that findings were based on solid,
unambiguous evidence. This meant that we only included cases that clearly involved both involuntary work and
coercion (see Section 1). The UK’s status as a developed country had the added advantage of shedding light into forced
labor in a developed country setting, broadening the typical geographical focus of the GVC literature.
Given how little is known about the supply chain dynamics of forced labor in this context we adopted a largely
inductive approach guided by the broad conceptual GVC framework, which involved three key analytical steps. First,
we surveyed existing data to select and analyze industrial sectors that would give us insights into forced labor in the UK.
We selected three industries – food, construction, and commercial cannabis cultivation – where forced labor had been
well documented in previous research as well as media reports.
Because industry structure is crucial to understanding forced labor, we selected industries with different types of
industry structure. The food industry is dominated by a handful of global food retailers and their large suppliers,
and provides insights into how forced labor manifests itself in a highly concentrated industry. The construction sector,
in contrast, comprises a large number of small firms and a high number of subcontractors. Commercial cannabis
cultivation is illegal in the UK, but according to the National Crime Agency (2016), is a rapidly growing industry worth
around £1 billion per year with a large number of organized criminal gangs operating. The cannabis industry therefore
sheds light into the supply chains of forced labor when the product being produced is illegal, and where the industry is
structured around criminal networks. Table 1 presents an overview of each industry structure.
Second, we mapped and compared how forced labor was manifested in the supply chains of each industry by
combining secondary industry data analysis with primary data gathered through semi-structured interviews with key
informants with firsthand knowledge of the patterns of forced labor in each industry (Table 2). These included police
officers involved in dismantling commercial cannabis operations, social auditors with experience of detecting forced
labor in the food and construction industries, barristers who had represented victims of forced labor, and
representatives of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. The majority of these informants had knowledge of more than
one of our industries.
In mapping forced labor in supply chains, we also reviewed audit firm data pertaining to patterns of detection of
forced labor in the food and construction industries over the last decade, but were asked not to publish this data within
our study. We then used court cases to triangulate our findings. For the food industry, we analyzed the Gangmasters
Licensing Authority’s conviction and appeal cases (2006–2013), as well as other court documents. For the construction
and cannabis industries, we reviewed recent court documents (2009–2013) containing information about forced labor.
On the basis of this triangulated data, we sought to understand and compare how forced labor was manifested in
different types of supply chains within the UK context.
In total, our desk-based study encompassed a total of 62 court documents and appeal cases, 35 newspaper articles, 42
academic studies, and 63 reports. Our primary data collection involved a total of 28 in-person interviews and five phone
interviews with experts on forced labor, including: academics, barristers, company chief executive officers, employer
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Table 1
Forced labor in domestic supply chains
Overview of industry structures for case studies
Value
Food
£97 billion
in 2012
Construction
£90 billion
in 2011
Cannabis
Approx
£1 billion
a year.
Workers
• 13 percent of national
employment in 2012
• 3.7 million workers in
food production in
2012
• 400,000 in food and
drink manufacturing
• 50 percent part-time
jobs
• Over 2 million
construction workers
in 2012
• Approx 400,000
bogus self-employed
workers.
• Often illegal migrants
• Growers of
Vietnamese origin
subjected to
exploitation
Firms
• Four retailers control
75 percent of market
share
• Over 1200 GLA
licensed labor
providers
• 53 percent of UK
food supply provided
domestically
• 250,000 firms in 2012
• 90 percent employ
fewer than 10 workers
• Labor providers are
fragmented, informal
and unregulated by
the GLA.
• 8000 commercial
cannabis cultivations
disrupted in 2011/2012
• Organized criminal
groups of Vietnamese
and more recently,
Chinese, descent.
Stability
• Least volatile of UK
manufacturing
industries
• Agriculture is more
volatile, with farm
profitability
dependent on
global prices.
• Highly volatile –
fell faster than
GDP during
recession, rose
faster in the upturn.
• Industry has grown
in recent years with
less reliance on
imports.
GDP, gross domestic product; GLA, Gangmasters Licensing Authority; UK, United Kingdom.
representatives, ethical auditors, law enforcement agents, non-governmental organization representatives, researchers,
and trade unionists. The interviews were transcribed and combined in a database with our secondary data. These data
were then analyzed using three levels of coding: (i) initial coding, where abstract concepts and themes that emerged from
the interviews were linked with those extracted from the secondary data in relation to the four broad categories of
structure, geography, governance, and institutional context; (ii) categorical coding, where initial codes were refined
and examined using NVivo10 in order to determine the specific manifestations of structure, geography, governance,
and institutional context; and (iii) thematic coding, where emerging themes were identified from the refined data
and comparisons with the extant GVC literature to develop deeper-level insights. For example, the following piece of
data was (i) initially grouped under “institutional context,” (ii) then coded in the category of “immigration law,” and
finally, (iii) interpreted as “institutional causes of worker vulnerability” in the domestic context: “You often see
immigration laws used to create, like engineer vulnerability in workers, so sometimes what you’ll even see is that the
employer might purposely wait for the visa to expire because then the worker’s much more vulnerable.”6
Following these rounds of analysis, we convened a round-table discussion, during which consultation took place
with eight experts in the field. The insights obtained contributed to a refinement of our results. Our findings are specific
to the UK and cannot be immediately extended to domestic supply chains in other countries, but the ongoing
documentation of forced labor suggests the need to investigate domestic supply chains in both developed and
developing countries in more detail.
4. Findings
Our analysis reveals some clear overlaps between what could be predicted by the GVC literature about forced labor in
domestic supply chains, as well as some significant differences. Table 3 summarizes these findings with respect to
structure, geography, governance, and institutional context.
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Table 2
Overview of interviewees
Position
Director, NGO
CEO, NGO
Head of Press & Research, trade union
Director of Strategy, non-departmental public body
President, corporation
Director, trade association
Executive, social audit firm
Head of Advocacy, NGO
Sustainability Manager, audit firm
Director, consulting firm
Journalist & Communications consultant
Executive Director, NGO
Head, NGO
Senior Manager, law enforcement
Head, multi-stakeholder initiative
Union Officer, labor union
Drugs Strategy Manager, law enforcement
Founder & Director, social audit firm
Policy Officer, trade union
Drug Expert, law enforcement
Chief Executive Officer, NGO
Associate Professor, university
Sector Manager for Construction and Utilities, compliance and risk management firm
Vice President, CSR Strategy, non-profit
Criminal Intelligence Analyst, law enforcement
Chief Executive, non-departmental public body
NGO Representative
Implementation Manager, recruitment company
NGO Representative
CSR team, food retailer
Labor provider
Professor, university
Supplier Engagement Manager, supply chain consultancy
Industries discussed
Food, construction, cannabis
Cannabis, food, construction
Food, construction
Food
Construction
Food
Food, construction
Cannabis
Food, construction
Cannabis, food, construction
Food, construction
Food, construction, cannabis
Cannabis
Cannabis
Food
Food, construction
Cannabis
Food, construction
Construction
Cannabis
Cannabis, food
Cannabis
Construction
Food, construction
Cannabis
Food
Food, construction
Construction
Food, construction
Food
Food
Food, construction, cannabis
Food
CEO, Chief Executive Officer; CSR, corporate social responsibility; NGO, non-governmental organization.
4.1. Structure of domestic supply chains in forced labor
There are both convergences and divergences in the structure of domestic versus global supply chains associated with
forced labor. Within the UK, a major difference is the clear dominance of labor providers and other intermediaries in
many cases of forced labor. Although intermediaries are known to be part of the structural GVC problem (Barrientos
2013), the main emphasis in mapping forced labor in GVCs is on how it manifests within the different stages of the
product supply chain. Within domestic supply chains, however, our analysis suggests that the labor supply chain is
equally if not more important. Furthermore, in the domestic context, forced labor often occurs within very simple
product supply chains, in contrast to the complex and multi-tiered input-output structures associated with forced labor
in GVCs (see also Section 5).
A product supply chain describes the discrete stages that a product goes through to transform it from raw materials
to a finished product. It is much less commonplace to talk of labor supply chains, but the concept of a supply chain is
also applicable to labor where intermediaries are involved. Labor market intermediaries are individuals or organizations
that “mediate between individual workers and the organizations that need work done, shaping how workers are
matched to organizations, how tasks are performed, and how conflicts are resolved” (Bonet et al. 2013, p. 339). Labor
intermediaries are not directly engaged in production, but provide labor and labor-related services to producers.
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Table 3
Forced labor in domestic supply chains
GVCs and forced labor: From global to domestic levels of analysis
Global
Structure
• Horizontal product supply chains
• Input-output of physical products and
services
Geography
• Global flow of products
Governance
• Private, by lead firms
• Unitary type, on market-hierarchy
continuum
Institutional
context
• Limited response to reorganization into
GVCs
• Deficits in protection of vulnerable
workers in developing countries
• Hard corruption and audit cheating
undermines protections
Domestic
• Horizontal product supply chains plus vertical
labor supply chains
• Input-output of physical products (horizontal)
plus input-output of labor (vertical)
• Domestic flow of products
• Global flow of labor
• Patchwork of private (by lead firms) and public
(by regulators)
• Combination of types from market-hierarchy
continuum
• Limited response to intermediation of labor
supply
• Institutional changes increase vulnerabilities of
workers in developed countries
• Audit scope and protocols undermine
protections
GVC, global value chain.
Examples of intermediaries are temporary agencies, recruitment agencies, labor providers, gangmasters, and payroll
companies (see also Osterman 1999; Kalleberg 2011).
A labor supply chain consists of the sequence of employment relationships that a worker goes through in order to
be deployed in a productive capacity. These labor supply chains might be short, for instance in a direct employment
relationship between a producer and a worker, where the worker has found the position independently. However, some
chains are extended because labor market intermediaries are present. Intermediaries may either facilitate a direct
worker–producer relationship (e.g. by helping the worker find employment) or substitute for a direct relationship
by employing or controlling the worker directly. As such, the relevant dynamics of interest are not just the input-output
of physical products but also the input-output of labor services as a “product” that is essentially traded by
intermediaries.
Although labor has rarely been considered within the input-output model of GVCs (for an exception, see Barrientos
2013), the role and importance of labor market intermediaries within the domestic economies of developed countries
has been well documented by scholars of employment law (Peck & Theodore 2007; Autor 2009; Fudge & Strauss 2013;
Weil 2014). In addition, this literature has analyzed the challenges that employment relationships involving
intermediaries pose to the enforcement of domestic labor law (Weil 2011; Dickens 2012). While scholars of employment
law do not generally use the terminology of supply chains, their analysis of the role of labor market intermediaries was
influential to our thinking about the structure of domestic supply chains associated with forced labor.
Labor market intermediaries featured prominently in all three of the sectors covered by our study. The UK has the
largest agency sector in the European Union (EU) (Gallagher & O’Leary 2007), as well as one of the most fragmented,
“with a significant proportion of small, local operators… supplying mainly low-status workers” (Balch & Scott 2011,
p. 144). The construction and food industries use a considerable amount of temporary, casual, and other forms of
contingent labor, the supply of which is often outsourced to third party labor providers (Forde et al. 2008; Lloyd &
James 2008; Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs [DEFRA] 2012). According to our analysis, these
intermediaries may in turn also source some of the required labor from further intermediaries. This can stretch to
several tiers in the supply chain, potentially even as many as five or six. Our research revealed that when forced labor
arises in the context of intermediaries, the labor supply chain is likely to be relatively long and complex, and the
forced labor component is likely to be several steps removed from the core labor force at the producer company.
Within the food industry, informants suggested that forced labor often enters into the labor supply chain in the face
of multiple subcontracted labor agencies. This tends to occur when a time-sensitive crop needs to be harvested, and
intermediaries experience a sudden need for more workers. Thus workers may only be present on the work site for
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a matter of days or weeks, making it difficult for producers to detect abuses within labor supply chains. One social
auditor informant described how a first tier labor intermediary would initiate a labor supply chain:
You call someone, you say I want 20 people and that person maybe has five people at their disposal so he phones
somebody else and he says, have you got some people and they go, yeah I have got three but I can get you another
eight, so he phones his mate, so it is very, very informal.7
The critical insight here is that forced labor needs to be understood in the context of the intersection of product and
labor supply chains. Figure 1 provides an illustrative example of these dynamics in the UK food industry. As this shows,
constructing the product supply chain helps us locate forced labor within the farming stage in the chain, but it is not
often farming organizations themselves that perpetrate forced labor. Rather, by mapping the labor supply chain we
can identify the different levels of subcontracted labor provision where the exploitation might have taken place.
As this suggests, outsourcing of economic activities is central to the occurrence of forced labor in the UK just as it is
in GVCs. Our findings suggest, however, that the location of forced labor in the UK is not restricted to outsourced
production but also to outsourced labor. An informant from the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians
explained the intersection of product and supply chains:
The key thing to remember is [that] the vast majority of the major construction companies directly employ very few
construction workers themselves… the work is subcontracted… So you get kind of second or third tier
subcontractors before you get anyone directly employing any workers. Now what increasingly happens is once
we’ve gone down that chain, rather than directly employing people themselves, there’s a very strong use of agency
workers.8
Figure 1 Illustrative product and labor supply chains giving rise to forced labor in food industry
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Figure 2 provides an example of such an arrangement. Such complexity provides the potential for exploitation
and, in some cases, forced labor. For instance, an informant from a human resources service provider suggested
that most instances of forced labor within the construction sector’s supply chain occur among subcontractors in
tiers 4 and 5. These tiers tend to be comprised of smaller producers and intermediaries, or “basic one-man shops,”
facing high pressure to cut labor costs because these can comprise high proportions of the costs of doing business.
Figure 2 Illustrative supply chains with subcontractors plus intermediaries giving rise to forced labor in construction
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As a result, “illegal labor contractors [are] often involved” because “smaller contractors need labor immediately to
fill orders.”9
In the context of cannabis growing, most cases of forced labor appear to be located within vertically integrated
criminal gangs that both traffic victims in from overseas and exploit them in grow-ops. However, outsourced labor
(where gangs source from unconnected traffickers) also features. That is, in the UK, organized criminal groups
dominate commercial cannabis cultivation (European Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation [EUROPOL]
2012), and often source basic labor from children and young adults trafficked into the country through debt bondage
(where the debt is a result of the fees paid to be smuggled in), and the bondage often results in compliance brought
about by threats made against family members of the victim.
Figure 3 provides an example of the supply chain dynamics in the cannabis industry, which although less complex
than food and construction, still exemplifies the importance of conceptualizing the industry in terms of intersecting
product and labor chains.
4.2. Geography of domestic supply chains in forced labor
The geography of domestic supply chains also offers some similarities as well as differences from their global
counterparts. Rather than a global flow of products as anticipated by the GVC literature (Phillips 2013), in our research,
we observed that forced labor in domestic supply chains tends to be associated with a domestic flow of products. Within
the UK, the relevant sections of the food, construction, and cannabis industries where forced labor emerged tended to
be where enterprises were engaged in domestic production for domestic sale with domestic sourcing. Although – given
the limited empirical data on the overall prevalence of forced labor within domestic versus export oriented products – it
is not possible to draw more general conclusions, given the emphasis on global product flows in the GVC literature, this
finding is worth exploring further.
For instance, in one recent case of forced labor described to us by informants with knowledge of the food industry,
30 workers in Kent were “subjected to slave-like conditions and controlled through the use of violence” by a licensed
gangmaster who supplied workers to Nobel Foods, a large UK processor of chickens and eggs (Gangmasters Licensing
Authority [GLA] 2012). The eggs produced by forced workers at Nobel Foods were sold to Tesco, McDonalds,
Sainsbury’s, and Marks & Spencer, which sold them to consumers across the UK. As one of our informants remarked:
So back to Noble Foods, well how many steps down the supply chain was it? One. M&S, Sainsbury’s Tesco’s, Asda,
McDonalds, and then Noble Foods – the manufacturers – and their gang masters, they were the ones caught with
the slaves.10
As this quote suggests, in this instance, forced labor emerged within a relatively simple supply chain associated with
a domestic flow of products.
Figure 3 Illustrative supply chains giving rise to forced labor in cannabis
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A global flow is, however, evident in the context of labor in that a large proportion of the victims of forced labor in
the UK appear to be migrant workers. As the country has increasingly restricted foreign unskilled workers’ access to its
labor markets, many have attempted to migrate through irregular channels and have ended up vulnerable to trafficking
and exploitation through forced labor. Others enter and work in the UK legally, but are either made to believe they are
working illegally by their employer, or become vulnerable because of restrictions placed on their right to work. For
example, one social auditor recounted the following case involving a distribution warehouse:
A group of Romanian women in their 40s were intentionally recruited because they couldn’t speak very good
English… They were made to think that they were illegal. So, [they were] forced to register under a false name,
[their] passports [were] taken away, and [they] had to pay various monies… A fellow worker acted as a middleman
with one of the local agency representatives to ensure all the women’s wages were paid into the bank account of the
middleman and he then distributed minimal monies to them. He claimed many deductions from their wages so
they never received enough money to cover their debts or save money. So in effect they were debt bonded to this
middleman.11
As mentioned, scholars of forced labor utilizing the GVC framework have emphasized the uneven power and value
capture between brand companies in the developed world and suppliers and workers in the developing world as a key
geographic dimension that can give rise to forced labor. By contrast, a key geographic determinant of forced labor in
domestic supply chains is this division of legal status and protections offered to workers depending on their country
of origin. The labor market power and rights of migrant workers in the UK is governed by their immigration status,
which allows free movement of EU workers, while, for instance, “simultaneously promoting the destitution” of asylum
seekers and others by removing their right to work (Dwyer et al. 2011, p. 9). In our study, those most frequently
identified as vulnerable to forced labor were workers from recent EU accession countries, most notably Romania
and Bulgaria. Between 2007 and 2014, such workers were free to enter the UK but were rendered highly vulnerable
to exploitation by a range of labor market and welfare restrictions and exclusions. These differing geographic dynamics
engendered new forms of regulatory gaps in relation to forced labor in domestic supply chains compared to those most
frequently emphasized in relation to GVCs. No doubt regulatory gaps surrounding migrant workers also contribute to
vulnerability to forced labor in many GVCs; however, these have been understudied and underemphasized. Thus, the
key role and importance of protections for migrant workers in the supply chains encompassed in our study is worth
emphasizing.
4.3. Governance of domestic supply chains in forced labor
In developing country contexts, the focus on remedying extreme exploitation in GVCs inevitably focuses on private
regulation by lead firms, typically through market-based mechanisms. While GVC scholarship has explored state-based
regulation, including hybrid and co-regulatory approaches in relation to labor standards protections more broadly,
when it comes to the challenge of tackling forced labor in the developing world, both policy and scholarship have
tended to focus on private governance. By comparison, domestic supply chains are understood to be governed through
a patchwork of private and public governance, involving both market- and hierarchy- based mechanisms. As Table 4
illustrates, our findings show that in the UK, the governance system to combat forced labor is currently fragmented,
relying on a combination of regulatory enforcement, licensing, and business self-regulation through social audit. It
bears noting that our data was collected in 2013, prior to the passing and implementation of the Modern Slavery Act
2015 and the UK’s 2016 ratification of the 2014 ILO Protocol on Forced Labour. Further research is needed to
investigate whether these new initiatives will address the fragmentation of governance systems.
Regulatory enforcement and policing targeting the business of forced labor is limited in the UK. As one report
collected as part of our secondary data concluded, “the evidence presented here suggests that there is patchy and
inconsistent regulation and enforcement around forced labor in the UK” (Balch 2012, p. 34). The criminalization of
forced labor with the enactment of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 and the obligations which flow from the
European Human Rights Convention that “no one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labor” means
that law enforcement now has a much wider remit to consider crime in the workplace. Yet such enforcement remains
very difficult, as contemporary law enforcement is geared toward crime in the public rather than in the private sphere,
which has its own regulatory framework (Scheingold 2011). In addition, efforts to combat forced labor through a
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Table 4
Intersections of public and private governance of forced labor
Approach
Key Agents
Strengths
Weaknesses
Limited workplace inspection.
Policing around minimum
wage mainly about
immigration status. Tends to
look for criminals, not victims.
Limited scope of GLA. Also
does not regulate labor
provision per se, only licenses
and revokes licenses.
Limited coverage of labor
supply chain. Auditors
obligated to report abuses to
their clients, not externally.
Regulatory
enforcement
Criminal justice
approach to
forced labor
Police; UK Border
Agency (UKBA);
Business, Innovation
and Skills (BIS)
Increased attention on forced
labor. Rising number of
prosecutions since 2009.
Licensing
Licensing of
labor providers
Gangmasters Licensing
Authority
Establishes oversight of labor
supply chain in certain sectors.
GLA has investigative powers.
Business
self-regulation
Verification of
supply chains
against forced
labor
Social audit firms;
NGOs
Establishes some monitoring
over product supply chains of
branded firms.
GLA, Gangmasters Licensing Authority; NGO, non-governmental organization.
criminal law framework can inflict “collateral damage” on victims and those vulnerable to forced labor (Dottridge
2007). The focus on locating individual criminals, not victims, can sometimes criminalize victims of forced labor. As
one of our informants from the National Crime Agency described of the cannabis sector:
We still get referrals made to us to say: ‘I think we have a trafficked victim here.’ …they’ve been encountered in a
cannabis cultivation, they’ve been arrested as an offender, they’ve had access to a defense solicitor, prosecution,
barristers have been involved as well, [a] judge has been involved, if they’re a child the local authority has been
involved and then they’ve gone to prison or a young offenders institute. Throughout that process clearly nobody
has identified the fact that these may be potential victims.12
Indeed, our research suggests that at or near the national minimum wage, policing around the workplace is
focused on immigration status rather than forced labor. Although established as a standalone crime in 2009,
forced labor is generally dealt with by law enforcement within the regulatory framework related to trafficking, which
has the UK Border Agency as one of its lead organizations in terms of the formal identification of victims. Because it falls
under the umbrella of trafficking, labor exploitation tends to take a back seat to sexual exploitation, which carries more
resonance with the general public, is given more emphasis as a political priority, and is more conducive to policing.
Regulatory enforcement within the private sphere is usually left to businesses themselves, much as is typically found
in global supply chains. However, the use of intermediaries, such as labor suppliers, has blurred the line of responsibility
between employer and employee, making it difficult to establish accountability for exploitation. Where hierarchical
regulation does exist in the area of business, it mainly transpires through licensing.
Licensing of labor intermediaries is an important way in which supply chains can be regulated to combat the
business of forced labor (although there are several others, including joint liability approaches; see Gordon 2015). Such
regulation of UK-based food supply chains commenced with the creation in 2005 of the Gangmasters Licensing
Authority (GLA), which has played a critical role in improving the standards of labor providers. However, the restricted
scope of licensing (at the time of our research, the GLA’s remit was limited to agriculture, horticulture, forestry, fish
processing, shellfish, dairy farming, food packaging, and processing), has meant it has had limited success in combating
forced labor.
The restriction of licensing to the food sector has prompted certain intermediaries to diversify to multiple
industries. As a GLA informant suggested, some labor agencies “divisionalize so that there is a division that deals with
providing workers into agriculture. They then mitigate and reduce their risk exposure in case we revoke their license.”13
If the GLA revokes an agency’s license to operate within the food industry, workers can be moved into another industry,
such as construction.
Non-GLA industries, such as construction, encourage the self-regulation of agencies, but there is no formal
enforcement to secure compliance. As such, the Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians union has made
clear that “many construction workers encounter daily exploitation from agencies and gangmasters.” While the Agency
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Workers Regulations came into force on October 2011, “giving agency workers the entitlement to the same basic
employment and working conditions” after 12 weeks on the job (UK Department for Business, Innovation & Skills
2011, p. 3), the lack of licensing authority means that there is little accountability or enforcement. As one union
informant noted, “unless it is covered by the GLA […] there is no one really looking.”14
Finally, in terms of private regulation, business self-regulation and social auditing is commonplace in
domestic supply chains, as it is globally. However, within the UK, limited detection occurs because the path
of social audits is typically built around a product supply chain rather than a labor one, and many incidences
of forced labor are episodic and emerge in subcontracted workplaces beyond the scope of current auditing
practice. As one social auditor commented regarding the inability of audits to trace through the labor supply
chain in the food industry:
So you go to a farm and they’re growing onions and you say, ‘Can I see your books?’ … and then you say, ‘Do you
use an agency?’ and they say ‘Yes’… But say they were using another agent you didn’t know. You can’t check that all
those three agents are responsible for all the people who’ve been on the farm. So there could always be another
group of people who aren’t written down and this happens commonly.15
Audits also tend to exclude farms that are outside major supermarket supply chains, as another social auditor
informant described:
Not all [of] the farms are involved in the supply chains of supermarkets and if you are going into the cash and
carries, if you are going into the markets, if you are going to those places, I am not aware of anybody who is
checking.16
This has particularly serious implications for industries such as construction that are primarily structured around a
business-to-business market, and illegal industries such as cannabis production that have no legitimate, downstream
retail stage. These design flaws combine with the gaps in public regulation to create a patchwork approach that leaves
critical gaps surrounding the governance of forced labor in domestic supply chains. In combination with the
institutional dynamics described below, these governance dynamics produced both similar and different regulatory
gaps in relation to forced labor in domestic supply chains than those predicted by the GVC framework, as we describe
in Section 5.
4.4. Institutional context of domestic supply chains in forced labor
The institutional context of domestic supply chains of forced labor reflected a similar picture to that in the global
context, albeit with some shifts in emphasis. That is, just as there has been a limited institutional response to preventing
forced labor in the reorganization into global supply chains, there has been a similar lack of effective institutional
response to the growing intermediation of labor supply in the domestic context.
In the UK, forced labor tends to emerge in “fissured workplaces” where, because of the high use of outsourcing and
labor market intermediaries, producer companies are separated from the actual employment of workers, and therefore
traditional methods for enforcing labor standards are inadequate (Weil 2014). As one report collected as part of our
secondary data put it:
The current concern with vulnerable employment has meant that new forms of state intervention are required to
deal with what some consider to be a more fragmented and ‘hidden’ workforce. Inspection and regulation find a
more decentralised terrain of work structured in many cases through a range of employment agencies, gangmasters
and forms of subcontracting. (Elliot & Lucio 2011, p. 26)
This lack of an institutional response to changing employment practices also needs to be viewed in the
context of other more active institutional changes that increased the supply of workers vulnerable to forced
labor. For example, as discussed above, institutional arrangements around the legal status of migrants created
a cadre of precarious workers who entered the UK facing severe restrictions on their ability to work legally
or claim benefits. Thus, rather than vulnerability to forced labor being primarily the result of deep-rooted
inequalities, such as poverty and gender discrimination, that are highly resistant to change (as in the case of
GVCs in developing countries), in the UK, vulnerability primarily arises from specific institutional characteristics
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and decisions that could, at least in principle, be overturned, but which are deliberately used to exploit workers,
as this NGO informant suggests:
You often see immigration laws used to create… engineer vulnerability in workers so sometimes what you’ll even
see is that the employer might purposely wait for the visa to expire because then the worker’s much more
vulnerable.17
Corruption also plays a part in a developed country setting, but in some ways that are different to the forms of
corruption commonly emphasized in relation to forced labor in developing countries. First, we found no evidence
or even suggestion of “hard” corruption, such as bribes to public officials or law enforcement officers, that would have
enabled forced labor to flourish unimpeded by the authorities. Even informants who were critical of the lack of
prosecutions tended to see this as the result of an inability to act in the face of institutional constraints rather the result
of any kind of explicit corruption.
Although not to the same extent as in GVCs in developing countries (O’Rourke 2003), evidence or accusations of
explicit cheating in the social audits of supplier firms was present in the UK context. For example, one social auditor
respondent recounted:
It used to be the standing joke that if you went to Alton Park (which is one of our amusement parks) on any
weekday, what you did find is loads of illegal workers who had been given the day off by their employers, and all
the difficult ones who were likely to say things to the auditors.18
In many ways, a form of softer corruption in auditing practice appears to have contributed most to the persistence
of forced labor in the UK. That is, the specific protocols of social audits in the UK lead to the limited detection and
reporting of forced labor.
Detection can be limited by soft forms of corruption because auditors may be implicitly or even explicitly
encouraged to not detect incidents of forced labor. As one social auditor described it, many auditors are “not trying
to find things out, they are trying to prove that something is not there.”19 Or in the words of an NGO informant,
“You have an industry of ethical auditors out there now who will find nothing if you pay them to go and find
nothing.”20 Soft corruption can also limit the reporting of potential cases of forced labor by social auditors. Our data
suggests that in the UK, the audit regime has not been organized to encourage reporting of criminal activity, but rather
auditors report to their clients. As one social auditor informant described the situation that arises if an audit reveals
potential incidents of forced labor:
We would have to work with the commissioning company on that to decide how they wanted to play it because…
unless you have real evidence that the law is being broken, you really cannot start going to the authorities – not if
you want to stay in business, anyway.21
Given these limitations on detection and reporting, it is perhaps not surprising that there have been several
incidents in recent years where forced labor has been found amid UK businesses that have successfully passed
social audits. In one such case, a police raid in Lincolnshire found 60 migrants subjected to forced labor harvesting
leeks by a firm called A14 Vehicle Hire, which supplied labor to Emmett UK. A14 had recently passed two
successful audits by Emmett, as well as an audit by the GLA. All of these audits failed to detect the abuse
(Shankleman 2008). While these softer forms of corruption may also be present in relation to auditing and forced
labor in GVCs, there is limited empirical evidence to confirm this. Thus an empirical basis to assess whether the
differences in “hard” and “soft” corruption in GVCs and domestic settings differ in type or degree is currently
lacking.
5. Implications and conclusions: Governance gaps surrounding forced labor in domestic supply chains
The GVC literature has characterized the problem of forced labor as one rooted primarily in the challenge of governing
labor standards in complex global product supply chains (such as multi-tiered, input-output structures crossing dozens
of national boundaries, and including unauthorized subcontracting and highly informal production networks) (Anner
et al. 2013; Phillips 2013; Gordon 2015). Informed by the key assumptions made about the structure, geography,
governance, and institutional context of supply chains outlined in Section 2, the literature has tended to locate the
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solution to the problem of forced labor in supply chains in public and private governance initiatives to address forced
labor in the developing world, with an emphasis on public “disclosure” legislation and corporate social responsibility in
developed countries (Gereffi et al. 2005; Locke 2013). This understanding of the problem and solution has had an
important impact on recent policymaking.
Over the last five years, a number of governments have passed responsive regulation to combat forced labor.
This body of legislation has framed the challenges of tackling the business of forced labor as one that concerns
global supply chains. For instance, California’s 2010 Transparency in Supply Chains Act (SB-657) requires retailers
and manufacturers with annual global profits exceeding US$1 million and conducting business in California to
report on the measures they are taking to address forced labor, trafficking, and slavery in their supply chain.
US federal legislation recently introduced to Congress (the Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking
and Slavery Act of 2015 [HR 3226]), as well as the transparency provisions included in the UK’s Modern Slavery
Act 2015, have been modeled after the California Act. As UK Prime Minister Teresa May described the impetus
behind the UK Act:
Modern slavery is international and requires an international response. So rather than chasing individual criminals
in Britain as they are reported, we need a radically new, comprehensive approach to defeating this vile and
systematic international business model at its source and in transit. (UK Prime Minister’s Office 2016)
Our findings, as laid out in the previous sections, suggest that this conceptualization of the contemporary problem
of forced labor is not wholly accurate, and that solutions premised upon it may be limited in their effectiveness. Our
work suggests that the governance gaps surrounding forced labor in supply chains needs to be re-thought along two
dimensions: in relation to domestic (as opposed to global) supply chains, and in terms of the differences that surround
forced labor that occurs in developed countries (as opposed to developing countries).
5.1. Governance gaps surrounding domestic supply chains
As mentioned, there is a need for larger-scale comparative study to confirm the patterns of forced labor in domestic
supply chains and how these might differ from that of GVCs. Within the three industries we examined in the UK,
there were a number of similarities and differences between domestic supply chain dynamics and those anticipated
by the GVC literature. In short, our research reveals the need to isolate product and labor supply chains, and to
engineer governance initiatives that respond to the specific forms of complexity typical of domestic chains. This
is an important insight given that business, NGOs, and government have consistently argued that the key challenge
in governing supply chains is their complexity,22 and this cult of complexity has prevented us from seeing some of
the simplicity of domestic product supply chains. Only by isolating the respective product and labor supply chains
can we identify the types of complexity that need to be targeted in domestic governance initiatives to combat forced
labor.
This finding has implications for policy, and particularly for the recent wave of public governance initiatives to
combat forced labor. Much attention to date has focused on transparency in relation to complex global supply
chains rather than domestic chains (UK Prime Minister’s Office 2016). Further, as this round of legislation is
focused along product supply chains and does not contain specific provisions related to the recruitment and
subcontracting of labor, there has been very little discussion of the need to address forced labor within labor supply
chains that give rise to forced labor.
By anchoring our exploration of governance gaps surrounding domestic supply chains in a case study of the UK, we
do not mean to suggest that governance gaps surrounding domestic supply chains are limited to developed countries.
Indeed, there is a similar need to rethink the governance of forced labor in domestic supply chains in the context of
developing countries. For instance, GVC literature that has explored labor exploitation in countries like China or
India, has tended to focus on the global connection and developed country consumers. Simply put, forced labor in
garments destined for consumption in developed country markets tends to receive much more attention than say, bricks
destined for domestic consumption. If governance initiatives to address forced labor are to do more than make
consumers in developed countries feel good about the products they buy, there is a need to focus closer attention on
forced labor occurring in domestic supply chains, and especially those that are not led by branded multi-national retail
companies.
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5.2. Governance gaps within developed countries
In addition to rethinking predictions about governance gaps from the domestic perspective in GVC literature, our
research also suggests that it is important to carefully calibrate our thinking about these issues in the context of
developing countries. Although to date the GVC literature has focused on governance gaps that give rise to labor
exploitation in developing country contexts (Locke et al. 2009; Barrientos et al. 2011), our study of the UK confirms
that many of these governance gaps exist in forced labor in developed country contexts as well.
Just as in many developing country contexts, the rolling back of the state regarding labor rights, inspection, and
standards enforcement has exacerbated the risks of workers in the UK being exploited in forced labor conditions.
However, the persistence of albeit patchy and inconsistent regulation and enforcement, combined with a relatively
effective but structurally limited system of licensing, means that the key challenges are to coordinate governance across
a patchwork of initiatives, both market and hierarchy-based, that are designed to address labor abuses, as well as
coordinate with broader regulation around immigration and other institutional conditions that promote vulnerability
to exploitation.
In some respects, these challenges of coordination were acknowledged by the UK government with the passing
of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, designed to create a more comprehensive and integrated response to the problem
of forced labor among other forms of extreme exploitation. The Act was first introduced in a draft bill in
December 2013 (after we had concluded our fieldwork), and aimed to “consolidate and simplify existing slavery
and trafficking offences,” to provide coordination across government with respect to enforcement, and also to
connect with a “wider non-legislative approach” that included “work with businesses on a voluntary basis so they
can ensure their workforces and supply chains are not exploited.”23 Yet the design and criminal justice focus of
the Act suggests that it may be ineffective in addressing the coordination challenges surrounding forced labor
documented through our research.
Although further research will be required once the Act has been implemented long enough to evaluate its
effectiveness, two weaknesses are important to note here. In the first case, the Act does little to correct the lack of
coordination between labor and immigration law enforcement uncovered in our research. Furthermore, policymakers
have raised concerns that a separate new piece of legislation – the 2016 Immigration Bill – will further increase the
vulnerability of migrant workers and undermine any improvements that the Modern Slavery Act does make in terms
of recognizing victims (cf. Blomfield 2016). Secondly, rather than bolstering enforcement around labor standards for
low and minimum wage workers, the Modern Slavery Act merely reinforces existing private initiatives to enforce labor
standards, for example, through auditing (which, as we note in Section 4.4, can be limited in their detection and
reporting of forced labor). Thus, the Act appears to do little to address concerns our informants raised about audit
scope and protocols undermining protection.
In short, while limited coordination between public and private governance initiatives is often considered to be a
problem typical of GVCs (Gereffi et al. 2005), our research suggests that this issue is also (and perhaps even more)
significant in terms of forced labor occurring in developed countries. However, in such settings, coordination gaps
are further exacerbated by limited intra-governmental agency coordination, as well as institutional changes that have
increased the vulnerabilities of migrant and low-wage workers. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of
governance in developed countries critically depends on understanding these interactions.
Finally, it is important to note that many of the governance gaps occurring within a developed country context
may be a matter of politics rather than capability deficit. The GVC literature asserts that “decent work deficits”
arising from changing patterns of production and labor market regulation are typically associated with developing
world contexts (Barrientos et al. 2011, 2013; McGrath 2013; Nadvi & Raj-Reichert 2015). Developed country
settings, by contrast, are often considered to have robust capability to enforce labor market regulation and social
protections for workers (Eberlein et al. 2014). Yet as our research on forced labor demonstrates, there is a need
to acknowledge that such deficits can be engineered through institutional and governance dynamics within
developed countries too. That said, there may be important variation surrounding the institutional context, as
suggested by our analysis of the similarities and differences in forms and degrees of corruption surrounding forced
labor in domestic and global supply chains. Large-scale and deeper study of the continuities and differences
between governance gaps surrounding forced labor in developed and developing country settings are sorely needed,
and would make a fruitful contribution to the burgeoning literature on how public and private governance
interactions might complement or compete with one another at a global level (Fransen 2013; Eberlein et al.
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2014; Gulbrandsen 2014). Ultimately, addressing the governance gaps that surround forced labor will require
scholars and policymakers to carefully refine their thinking about how we might design operative governance that
effectively engages with local variation.
Acknowledgment
We acknowledge funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation [grant number 11663J] and the UK ESRC [grant
number ES/N001192/1]; and thank Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance,
and Abolition; Schulich School of Business’ Centre for Excellence in Responsible Business; and the International
Labour Organization (ILO) Special Action Programme to Combat Forced Labour for additional support. We are
grateful to Mark Anner, Brian Burgoon, Ben Cashore, Burkard Eberlein, Luc Fransen, Daniel Mügge, and Nicola
Phillips for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper and helpful conversations. We benefited from helpful
discussions of this paper at the 2014 International Studies Association Conference, 2015 ILO Regulating Decent Work
Conference, 2016 SPERI-PETGOV Workshop at the University of Amsterdam, and seminars at Zicklin School of
Business, Baruch College, CUNY and IESE Business School, University of Navarra.
Notes
1 For a genealogy of the GVC concept and overlapping concepts like global commodity chains and global production networks, see
Bair (2008).
2 Article 2(1) ILO Forced Labour Convention, (No. 29), 1930.
3 European Court of Human Rights, Siliadin v France (Application 73316/01), 26 July 2005.
4 See International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Prosecutor v Milorad Krnojelac (IT-97-25-A) Judgment, 17
September 2003, p. 87; England and Wales Court of Appeals, Connors and Ors v. R., EWCA Crim 324, 2014.
5 At present, the lack of reliable country or sector-level prevalence data on forced labor means that it is not possible to measure
change over time.
6 Interview with Anti-Slavery International informant. 8 March 2013, London.
7 Interview with Impactt informant, 6 March 2013, London.
8 Interview with Union of Construction, Allied Trades and Technicians informant, UCATT, 12 March 2013, London.
9 Telephone interview with Archilles informant, 25 February 2013.
10 Interview with Association of Labour Providers informant, ALP, 6 March 2013, London.
11 Interview with Impactt informant, 12 March 2013, London.
12 Interview with United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre informant (UKHTC). 5 March 2013, Birmingham.
13 Interview with Gangmasters Licencing Authority (GLA). 11 March 2013, Nottingham.
14 Interview with Trades Union Congress informant (TUC). 8 March 2013, London.
15 Interview with Impactt informant, 6 March 2013, London.
16 Interview with Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS). 13 March 2013, London.
17 Interview with Anti-Slavery International informant. 8 March 2013, London.
18 Interview with Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS). 13 March 2013, London.
19 Interview with Impactt informant, 6 March 2013, London.
20 Interview with Anti-Slavery International informant. 13 March 2013, London.
21 Interview with Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS). 13 March 2013, London.
22 See, for instance, evidence statements submitted to and published by the UK Parliament relating to the Modern Slavery Act
(accessed 20 January 2015): http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/joint-select/draft-modern-slaverybill/written-evidence/?type=Written#pnlPublicationFilter
23 Draft Modern Slavery Bill, December 2013, UK Government Home Office: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/
uploads/attachment_data/file/266165/Draft_Modern_Slavery_Bill.pdf
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Cases Cited
Connors and Ors v. R., EWCA Crim 324, 2014, England and Wales Court of Appeals.
Prosecutor v. Milorad Krnojelac (IT-97-25-A) Judgment, September 17, 2003, International Criminal Tribunal for the former
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Siliadin v. France (Application 73316/01), July 26, 2005, European Court of Human Rights.
Laws Cited
Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act of 2015 [HR 3226]
Coroners and Justice Act 2009
Draft Modern Slavery Bill
Immigration Bill 2016
Modern Slavery Act 2015
Transparency in Supply Chains Act (SB-657) 2010
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