Most definitions of corporate social responsibility describe it as a concept whereby companies integrate social and environmental concerns in their business operations and in their interaction with their stakeholders on a voluntary basis. Commission of European Communities. (2001). Promoting a European Framework for Corporate Social Responsibilities, COM 336 final. Brussels. Page 6.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2001:0366:FIN:EN:PDF

Forced labour is a legal term that is defined in the International Labour Organization’s Convention of Forced Labour, 1930 ‘as all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which the said person has not offered himself voluntarily’. Forced labour refers to situations in which persons are coerced to work through the use of violence or intimidation, or by more subtle means such as accumulated debt, retention of identity papers or threats of denunciation to immigration authorities The most vulnerable and excluded groups (such as women, undocumented or temporary migrants, religious minorities and indigenous people), are often subject to intersecting forms of discrimination and disadvantage, and are disproportionately relegated to forced labour. See here for the ILO’s information on Forced labour, modern slavery and human trafficking.

Global production network analysis places global value chains in their broader context, and unlike the global value chain approach, which focuses on inter-firm relations, emphasizes factors as the state, civil society actors and trade unions, for example, shape production, the labour process and employment outcomes.

Global value chain refers to production of a single product that takes place in multiple locations, by different firms. Global value chain analysis emphasizes where value is created in the chain, and which actors and locations are capturing the created value.

First conceptualized in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, it refers to companies’ actions to identify, assess, and address human rights abuses resulting from their actions. While exercising human rights due diligence, a company may prioritize risks that are known to be most relevant to their sector or their own position in the supply chain. Human rights due diligence may be conducted by companies alone, or by working with other stakeholders such as other companies, suppliers, buyers, NGOs, etc.

In 2000, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children.

Article 3 of the Trafficking Protocol defines the crime of ‘trafficking in persons’ in terms of three elements, the action, the means and the purposes:

the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.

This definition is simultaneously very cumbersome and indeterminate. The action element requires some type of movement (recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of a person), whereas the means entail some form of coercion or abuse of power. The purpose element of the crime, ‘exploitation’, is not itself defined; the Protocol simply lists specific examples of exploitation, some of which are defined in other international legal instruments, which function as minimum requirements.

Canada defines human trafficking in the Criminal Code:

Trafficking in persons

279.01 (1) Every person who recruits, transports, transfers, receives, holds, conceals or harbours a person, or exercises control, direction or influence over the movements of a person, for the purpose of exploiting them or facilitating their exploitation is guilty of an indictable offence and liable
(a) to imprisonment for life and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of five years if they kidnap, commit an aggravated assault or aggravated sexual assault against, or cause death to, the victim during the commission of the offence; or
(b) to imprisonment for a term of not more than 14 years and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of four years in any other case.
(2) No consent to the activity that forms the subject-matter of a charge under subsection (1) is ) is valid.

Exploitation for the purposes of human trafficking is also defined in the Criminal Code:

279.04 (1) For the purposes of sections 279.01 to 279.03, a person exploits another person if they cause them to provide, or offer to provide, labour or a service by engaging in conduct that, in all the circumstances, could reasonably be expected to cause the other person to believe that their safety or the safety of a person known to them would be threatened if they failed to provide, or offer to provide, the labour or service.

The Canadian definition of trafficking only includes two elements- movement and purpose; it does not require the means element as set out in the international definition of human trafficking. Moreover, the Canadian definition of exploitation is different than the ILO’s definition of forced labour. The Canadian definition requires that the victim “believe that their safety or the safety of a person known to them would be threatened if they failed to provide, or offer to provide, the labour or service”

A labour chain refers to a ‘chain’ of workers, producers and contractors that correspond with a supply chain. Much like supply chains, labour chains often operate transnationally. For example, workers may be hired by a contractor in one country to work at a production facility in another

A labour contractor is an intermediary that matches job seekers with employers, getting commission from either the employer or worker. Labour contractors may take on a variety of roles that go beyond connecting workers to employers, such as overseeing housing and transportation (if the workers are migrants) or managing and training the workforce. Labour contractors vary between those which are formally registered companies and contractors which are informal, operating outside of legal employment relationships. Labour contractors have been key actors assisting lead firms in outsourcing risk and increasing the flexibility of their workforce.

Modern Slavery is an umbrella term designed to capture a range of unfreedoms prohibited in international human rights laws. It includes human trafficking and forced labour.

Modern Slavery Laws build on global governance initiatives such as the United Nations Global Compact that are designed to spur due diligence for labour rights in global supply chains. Multinational corporations (MNCs) have adopted an array of due diligence or corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, such as supplier codes of conduct, certification schemes and social auditing, to address violations of labour rights in their supply chains. Modern slavery laws are a form of “new” governance, responsive regulation or reflexive law that build upon private CSR initiatives undertaken by some MNCs by imposing minimum obligations on all MNCs to adopt CSR measures. Their goal is to stimulate and steer self-regulation by social institutions. Modern slavery laws differ in terms of coverage, the form, content and stringency of disclosure requirements, and whether or not auditing is required. At the same time as these laws are proliferating, evidence of the ineffectiveness of CSR mechanisms is mounting, and attention is turning away from top-down corporate led-initiatives to bottom-up worker-driven forms of corporate social responsibility.

Social auditing is a process for evaluating, reporting on, and improving an organization’s performance and behavior, and for measuring its effects on society. Social auditing can be used to produce a measure of the social responsibility of an organization. It takes into account any internal code of conduct as well as the views of all stakeholders and draws on best practice factors of total quality management and human resource development. Like internal auditing, social auditing requires an organization to identify what it is seeking to achieve, who the stakeholders are, and how it wants to measure performance. Social auditing provides an assessment of the impact of an organization’s nonfinancial objectives through systematically and regularly monitoring its performance and the views of its stakeholders. In accounting terms, social auditing is defined as a review of the public-interest, nonprofit, and social activities of a business. These audits usually are performed primarily for internal benefit and typically are not released to the public. The social audit may be performed routinely by internal or external consulting groups, as part of regular internal audits. These evaluations consider the social and environmental impacts of business activities.

Most companies have socially oriented programs of one kind or another and every company obviously has an impact on the society in which it lives. Public concern about the ways companies fulfill their social responsibilities has created pressure for “social auditing” in the corporate domain, and executives themselves have been attracted to the notion of a social audit as a possible method for satisfying both themselves and the public that their companies are doing what they ought to be doing in the social area.

Zu, L. (2013). Social Auditing. In S.O. Idowu, N. Capaldi, L. Zu & A. D. Gupta (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Corporate Social Responsibility. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28036-8_250



https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-3-642-28036-8_250