Eight key themes emerged during discussions and presentations at the event; (i) The importance of worker-centred approaches; (ii) Equitable partnerships throughout the value chain; (iii) Collecting and utilising the right data; (iv) Ensuring sustainability; (v) Understanding and alleviating pressures on EMDE businesses; (vi) Collaboration and stakeholder engagement; (vii) Effective legislation and policy measures; and (viii) Measurable impact. Conclusions identified from many of these fed directly into the proposed principles.
Theme 1: The importance of worker-centred approaches
Centralising workers at the heart of discussion and at the core of solutions is essential to upholding workers’ rights and addressing vulnerabilities to economic exploitation. A worker-centric approach prioritises workers’ voices, rights and lived experiences to derive meaningful and lasting improvements in wages and working conditions. An effective worker-centric approach to providing decent work includes empowering and informing workers, embedding lived experiences into policy and practice, protecting fundamental labour rights, and ensuring legal protection for workers.
Effective access to remedy remains a critical component of the human rights due diligence processes, yet corporate-led grievance mechanisms often fall short in providing access to timely remediation, especially for migrant workers. There is a recognised need to address critical gaps in remedy processes at local level, and to improve local capacity and infrastructure to ensure effective grievance handling.
Key conclusions:
- Fundamental labour rights, including freedom of association for all workers, including temporary and undocumented migrant workers, must be upheld.
- Strengthening migration governance, legal frameworks, and guidance to help workers make informed migration choices and access safer migration pathways should be a priority for both origin and destination country governments. This includes raising awareness in vulnerable communities, providing training to professionals and other relevant bodies to recognise and report signs of exploitation, offering support services to victims such as medical care and ensuring ethical recruitment practices.
- Strong partnerships with community organisations, faith groups and civil society organisations can help businesses and actors such as national human rights institutions reach and educate workers, especially in traditionally non-unionised sectors. Strengthening these grassroots networks can help with the early detection of labour issues and provide timely support and interventions.
- Targeted worker awareness programs and peer-to-peer learning would help equip workers, particularly in informal sectors, with knowledge of their rights, building capacity to advocate for fair wages and better working conditions.
- Local outreach initiatives could help build worker confidence in engaging with independent reporting tools for addressing labour rights violations.
- Building consumer awareness and leveraging consumer activism could help amplify workers’ concerns and drive advocacy efforts, creating bottom-up stakeholder pressure.
- Bringing in worker and forced labour survivor voices would help improve governance models, policies, local programming as well as monitoring tools such as audits.
- Grievance mechanisms and remedy processes need to be trusted, accessible and responsive to workers’ needs. They should incorporate worker feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Local networks, community organisations and trusted rightsholder groups are a valuable source of expertise in developing culturally appropriate and gender-sensitive remediation processes.