"New Publication: Worker-Driven Social Responsibility - Exploring a New Model for Tackling Labour Abuse in Supply Chains", 19 March 2020

Today, FLEX publishes a new report, Worker-Driven Social Responsibility: Exploring a New Model for Tackling Labour Abuse in Supply Chains. The report explores ‘worker-driven social responsibility’ (WSR) as a tool for ensuring decent work for outsourced, subcontracted and offshored workers and questions how it might work in different contexts...

WSR was created in and has mainly been applied to contexts that are highly hostile towards trade unions and other workers’ organisations... While the UK has implemented a number of policies that have made it harder for workers to organise and bargain collectively, and though state labour market enforcement is under-resourced and works better for some groups of workers than others, the UK nonetheless remains a different context to those in which WSR developed.

In the light of this, FLEX’s new report explores what the contribution of WSR might be in a society and economy like the UK... It finds that WSR is a useful and important tool in contexts or sectors that are hostile to unionisation and that it could function as a pathway to long-term, sustainable worker organising, as long as it is deployed carefully...