Worker-driven social responsibility

Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) is a model of human rights enforcement primarily designed to empower and protect low-wage workers in global supply chains, such as farmworkers, garment workers, and fishers.^[1][2] Programs that employ the WSR model, such as the Fair Food Program (FFP) or the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, provide low-wage workers a means for claiming, defining, and enforcing their human rights in the workplace. Through legally-binding agreements with major corporations at the top of global supply chains, workers and their organizations are able to harness the end buyers’ purchasing power to drive cooperation from their employers with the programs’ monitoring and enforcement processes and compliance with their fundamental human rights. Those legally-binding agreements, in conjunction with monitoring and enforcement tools, together comprise the WSR model.^[3][4][5][6]

The model was forged through a national campaign by the farmworker-led Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) in the early 2000s to secure a series of “Fair Food” agreements from major fast food, foodservice and grocery chains in the US. On the basis of those agreements, which conditioned the brands’ purchases on their suppliers’ compliance with human rights, the CIW designed and launched the Fair Food Program (FFP) in 2010. The FFP’s early success in turn inspired worker organizations across the globe to adopt the model, growing the new model’s footprint in supply chains that are reliant on low-wage workers.^[7][3][8] As of 2024, WSR programs protect workers in a variety of industries in the US, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Lesotho, the UK, South Africa and Chile. Workers in other industries and geographies – from the seafood industry in the UK to agriculture in India, Europe and Latin America, as well as the garment industry in Sri Lanka, Morocco, and India - are in different stages of exploring or launching WSR programs in their workplaces.^[9]

In contrast to collective bargaining agreements, which secure gains for workers from their immediate employers in specific workplaces, WSR programs utilize legally-binding agreements between worker organizations and major corporations that do not directly employ the workers but significantly influence their conditions nonetheless, due to their consolidated purchasing power at the top of global supply chains.^[10][11] The legally-binding agreements with companies atop supply chains are an essential component of WSR, and have also been referred to as ‘enforceable brand agreements.’^[12] The agreements tie purchasing to suppliers’ compliance with a worker-informed code of conduct as verified by the worker-driven monitoring and enforcement process. Worker organizations and labor unions often utilize WSR agreements as complementary rights schemes to secure protections otherwise excluded from, or problematic to enforce through, collective bargaining contracts, or to protect workers who are legally excluded from the protections of labor laws.^[13]

The WSR model is also distinguished from the traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) paradigm in both structure and function. Both models point to longstanding human rights violations at the bottom of global supply chains as the principal reason for their existence, but the two approaches diverge significantly from that common starting point, on two foundational levels: 1) Who are the primary actors behind the model, and 2) How those actors view and address the labor abuses in question. In the traditional CSR paradigm, the primary actors are the brands at the top of the supply chain, who typically view longstanding human rights violations through the lens of the potential reputational harm those violations may cause their brands in the marketplace. Consequently, the CSR approach is structured almost exclusively around the annual or bi-annual social audit, a brief, finite monitoring intervention that results in a public-facing certification that is issued for a fixed period of time, usually until the next scheduled audit, and that typically lacks any meaningful mechanisms for ongoing monitoring or enforcement in the interim. In the WSR model, on the other hand, the primary actors are the workers experiencing the abuses themselves, and their primary interest lies in ending the immediate human rights crisis in their workplace, not the downstream reputational harm to brands in the marketplace. Consequently, the WSR model is structured around a mix of worker-driven monitoring and enforcement mechanisms designed to provide workers with ongoing tools for identifying and remedying rights violations in real time, and any certification is not for a fixed period into the future, but rather is contingent on continuous compliance and can be suspended at any time.^{[citation needed]}

These differences in structure and function have resulted in measurable differences in outcomes, as well. Multiple studies and reports from the past decade have documented both the failure of the traditional CSR model -- including the related approach known as Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives (MSIs) -- to achieve their stated purpose of protecting human rights in the global supply chain, and the success of WSR initiatives in addressing those same abuses. The most far-reaching of those studies, a ten-year longitudinal study of 40 of the leading MSI programs and CSR certification schemes, asked the question, “Have MSIs delivered on their promise to protect human rights?”^[14] The Harvard University-incubated study concluded that MSIs “are not effective tools for holding corporations accountable for abuses, protecting rights holders against human rights violations, or providing survivors and victims with access to remedy.”^[14] That same study, released in 2020, pointed to the Fair Food Program and the WSR model as the emerging “gold standard” for human rights protection in corporate supply chains, with effective mechanisms for “empowering rights-holders to know and exercise their rights.”^[14]

Because the prevention of human rights violations at the bottom of the supply chain also equates to effective risk mitigation and reputational protection at the top (while the inverse does not hold true), the WSR model is increasingly seen as a “win/win/win” model capable of protecting both low-wage workers’ interests as well as those of their immediate employers and the retail brands that buy the products they produce. As a result, the WSR model has won widespread recognition since its inception in 2010. WSR programs have been recognized as an “international benchmark” in the fight against modern-day slavery by the United Nations^[15] as well as the ‘platinum’ standard for farm labor protection in supply chains by the United States Department of Agriculture.^[16] The MacArthur Foundation called the model, “a visionary strategy with the potential to transform workplace environments across the global supply chain,” and the Harvard Business Review recognized the Fair Food Program “one of the most important social impact stories of the past century.”