The humans are missing: Ask the workers

timnicolle7
Jun 30
7 min read

In the last few weeks, we have read numerous posts on LinkedIn referring to the fact that:

"humans are missing from human rights due diligence".

There are links to some of those posts at the end of this blog. We specifically have to thank Debadatta Bose for his article (see the link at the end of this blog), from which we borrowed this headline.

And here we are talking about worker human rights and how business:

monitors the treatment of workers in their supply chains,
diagnoses root cause if there are matters of concern, and
designs and delivers remedy on a sustained basis.

Where are the workers?

Workers are people that contribute to the enterprise value of a business but are not necessarily employed by them. Perhaps 70% of the enterprise value of most businesses comes from people who are not directly employed - but who are contributory workers.

These are people in locations that businesses operate (as landlords) and people working for suppliers. This can be in your own offices, your construction sites, in shopping centres, in distribution centres, in sub-contractors and out-sourced service centres - and of course people who work in your supply chains.

Most businesses have made public commitments to monitor how workers in this broadest sense are being treated and commitments to work with suppliers and stakeholders to remedy concerns that might be identified.

But, as so many commentators are pointing out, human rights due diligence processes that focus on worker-human-rights generally do not involve the workers themselves in any meaningful or substantive way.

That's what we mean when we ask "Where are the workers?".

Ask the workers - workers are the missing humans

Asking the workers is an obvious thing to do but it has always been a challenge - logistically, financially and safely.

What does business do today?

Most businesses largely rely on SAQs and social audits.

SAQs means a "self-assessment questionnaire". But asking a supplier whether it is abusing the rights of its labour force is pretty pointless.

It is astonishing that SAQs are widely accepted as an effective way to monitor how workers are treated.

Social audits: Social audits are a process by which a trained auditor visits a workplace to run through a checklist, document findings and report back. This is more effective than an SAQ, but social audits generally do not detect important issues affecting workers because they are a B2B process focussing on policy and process but without investigating management delivery. For example, a typical social audit may report on the existence of an anti-harassment policy, but not how effectively it is delivered. Only workers can provide that insight and only if they can trust that they are safeguarded with their anonymity protected, especially if they are providing negative feedback.

Social audits are not good at detecting worker-human-rights issues.

See here for commentary on the failings of social audits in these areas and why we need worker-led solutions.

So it is largely right to say that the humans are missing from human rights due diligence - and that the solution is to ask the workers.

How did we get here? HRDD without the H?

We have reached a point where human rights due diligence ("HRDD") is largely based on social audits and SAQs and, as a result, is largely ineffective and missing out the humans.

We are here because there have not been any better alternatives that appropriately balance cost versus effectiveness and benefits delivered.

Business wants to do the right thing but budgets are often small. It is common to find a team of 3 or 4 people at head office trying to keep on top of a supply chain of 3000 or more suppliers.

And, until now, there has not been any way to gain feedback from workers directly other than via the very light and infrequent touch of a social audit, or through expensive surveys, both of which can be influenced or manipulated by the employer who is usually involved in administrating the process, selecting or being aware of the identities of participating workers.

Nearly everyone we talk to has experience of worker surveys - whether delivered by app, phone, web or SMS. But they are expensive to set up and expensive to do - and their effectiveness is questionable. The programs proposed by most "worker voice" platforms usually cost $25,000 or more at entry level. And on top, there is significant disruption to workers and production each time a survey runs.

We can imagine what we would want; but until now and our Ask the workers platform - there has not been an effective tool that both delivers an effective out come and hits the price points that business is prepared to pay.

Ask the workers - how we started

The "Ask the workers" platform emerged from our trade finance business - providing working capital to factories across South and East Asia.

Via our local offices in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and in China - and providing capital to 100s of factories - we quickly understood the disconnect between what business reported and what workers experienced.

We are here to provide a service to workers and to business.

What would the ideal solution look like?

With increasing penetration of smart phones into worker populations, even in emerging markets, we can imagine that the smart phone can provide an effective route through which worker feedback could be collected.

And the resulting "app" would be something that most of us could quite easily describe:

All-the-workers: We want a platform (an app) that connects us to all "our" workers in all our suppliers, all the time and which collects data from those workers every day about how they are being treated in terms of their worker human rights.

Trust: We want workers to be able to trust the app so that they can give safeguarded, anonymous and truthful responses. Ideally the app should collect no information on individual workers (no names, geo-locations, emails or phone numbers - zero permissions on the phone) so that individuals cannot be identified and the platform can operate in markets with strong privacy laws.

Authentic: we want to be confident that workers are commenting on locations where they actually work.
Easy: We would like the app to be easy to implement and easy to use, collecting data from workers sensitively and quickly without disturbing production or daily work at our suppliers.

Salient: We want the results to be mapped to useful risk categories that we understand (eg: the ILO conventions, the ETI base codes) and we want the platform to tell us easily what we need to look at.

Shareable: We want the results to be shared with our suppliers so that they see what we can see; that's to encourage them towards prevention and, if necessary, self-remedy without us getting involved. Workers should provide their feedback through a single channel and the resulting data should be shared with everyone that has an interest in how they are being treated.
Continuous: We want the app and the platform to run continuously for data to be always current and to identify changes in conditions. This is because is more effective; it automatically supports prevention of worker abuses as workers constantly report on management behaviours, and it enables the monitoring of sustained remedy-delivery; it also makes it harder for local management to coach workers, and it means we automatically pick up changes in the workforce (eg: seasonality and turnover).

Fitting our budget: We want the app and the platform to be low cost both to implement and to operate - it's deployment and operation must fit within our limited budgets of finance and resources, and it should not disrupt productivity at our suppliers.

Risk: Continuous and real-time reporting by workers can mean that brands and retailers (stakeholders) are never in the dark as to conditions here and now. Risks are identified immediately, before they appear in the media or accusations are made by 3rd parties.
Remediation and Cost: With real-time monitoring, it becomes possible to detect and remedy/or compensate immediately an issue arises and before it becomes embedded. Every day that passes makes poor conditions more difficult and expensive to correct and for behaviours to become more habitual and accepted.

Ask the workers - it meets all the criteria

With Ask the workers, you have all the capabilities set out above.

The cost, at scale, of our platform is from US$10 per month per workplace regardless of the number of workers involved (and its free for workers, free for workplaces).

Moreover, our app can be used by workers anywhere and at any time - so there can be no disruption to the supplier. And it is easy to deploy at scale because it is so simple to use.

We work with your very limited budgets

We understand that businesses (or "stakeholders", as we call them) have a very limited budgets available to monitor how workers are treated in their supply chains.

Before we designed our app and platform, we spent sometime understanding the pressures that ethical and sustainable sourcing teams experience; we established that, at scale, funds are very limited.

The target price point we established, from the start, was the ability, at scale, to monitor each workplace for a cost of US$10 per month - free for the workplace itself and free for its workers, no matter how many workers there are.

We built this US$10 price-point into our model as a constraint from day one.

It's tough to deliver a truly effective platform that can operate at such low price points.

But here we are and our platform delivers all the outcomes listed above.

It is easy to check - just ask us for a short demo (takes 15-30 minutes over Teams).

What next then?

The emergence of cost-effective technologies to connect business safely to workers means that it's now possible to know how workers are being treated in your supply chains at scale.

The "Ask the workers" platform is a very important development for the global market.

Workers tell us - and then we tell you.

Whether you have 10 suppliers or 10,000 suppliers, we are the platform that you need.

Get in touch with us to find out more:

Set up a short call: click here call us
Write to us via the form at the bottom of our home page: here.

info@es3g.com