Why Supply Chain Professionals Must Address Issues Like Modern Slavery

Those of us who live and breathe supply chain management are acutely aware of this discipline’s role in the business world’s efforts to advance sustainability. Our tendency when looking at potential solutions, however, is to focus on two of the three major areas of sustainability and woefully neglect the third member of the triumvirate. When this happens, we miss the opportunity -- and neglect our responsibility -- to do our part in reducing human suffering around the globe.

Sustainability, as it’s come to be known in over the last 15 to 20 years, has three main pillars – environmental, social, and economic, or, as some prefer, planet, people, and profits. And as my co-authors and I wrote in Integrating Blockchain Into Supply Chain Management, a sustainable firm isn’t possible unless the supply chain is sustainable. We can approach sustainability from various angles, but the most significant advancements will come as we improve and implement processes, best practices and technologies throughout supply chains.

Blockchain is an emerging technology with great potential for improving sustainability all across the supply chain and in all three core areas. Smart contracts using blockchain, for instance, can provide simple, cost-effective agreements in procurement that benefit economic sustainability. And blockchain can provide a transparent system for tracking things like hazardous waste in ways that prevent fraud and manipulation and thereby benefits environmental sustainability.

The environmental and economic pillars are important, but they tend to get the bulk of the world’s attention, especially in the context of supply chains. Corporations naturally are concerned with profits, so they want to ensure that sustainability efforts benefit the bottom line. Conservationists helped jump-start the sustainability movement, and the impact of business practices on Mother Nature often is widely reported by the media and easy for the public to see. The social component of sustainability, however, often gets hidden and overlooked when we examine the role of supply chain.

Anulipt Chandan, Vidyasager Potdar, and Michele Rosano provide a nice summary of some challenges blockchain might solve in “How Blockchain can help in Supply Chain Sustainability,” a paper they presented last year at a conference in Perth Western Australia. To their credit, they presented four examples of supply chain-related sustainability issues that fall under the “social” pillar, including the one that’s most commonly heard in these types of discussions – food traceability. Nobody wants to get sick from eating bad lettuce, right? And blockchain helps us more quickly trace foods to their origins, which can prevent not only illnesses but deaths.

Blockchain can serve the social pillar of sustainability by bringing transparency and clarity to increasingly complex supply chain systems. That’s not only great for tracing the origins of foods like lettuce, but also for tracing the source of raw materials like cobalt.

Why does that matter? Because much of the world’s cobalt, a metal that’s essential for the batteries in phones and laptops, comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And as Martin LaMonica pointed out in an article on theconversation.com, that country has a history of human rights abuses, including slavery.

The unfortunate reality is that modern slavery and other human rights abuses take place in various forms all around the planet, and those are links in every supply chain we need to work harder to eliminate. 

Of course, as LaMonica noted, “no technology on its own can solve a complex social problem. . . . If humans want to undermine accountability systems, they will find ways of doing so. Just recording transactions is not enough. As part of a comprehensive agenda to tackle the myriad factors underlying modern slavery, though, it [blockchain] may prove a useful tool.”

There are three pillars to sustainability because all three are important, so I’m not suggesting we stop focusing on profits or the planet. But those of us who live and breathe supply chain management need to do our part to explore every tool possible to strengthen the people pillar of sustainability, especially when it comes to those aspects that hide in the darkness.