Measured against the standards of an interdisciplinary human factors research, there is a huge divide between the high level of knowledge achieved in sustainable work design and the documented work reality at the beginning of global supply chains. Especially in the “low wage” locations of supply chains in the global South, an active design of humane work seems like a utopian endeavour; even a Taylorist rationalization could already be perceived as “progress” (Distelhorst et al., 2017). As various reports of the International Labor Organization (ILO) reveal, there is a long list of ongoing violations of elementary labour standards in global supply chains: child labour, forced labour, overwork, poverty wages, lack of health protection, injuries and deadly accidents, oppression of worker organizations and representation. Against this background, this blog entry asks what impact human factors research could have in the debates around the enforcement of global labour standards. What special contribution could human factors make in the context of work in global supply chains?
Human factors and sustainability
Human factors, also called human or industrial engineering, study ergonomics and job design in an interdisciplinary endeavour to understand the human side of work and working in socio-technical production systems. Combining insights from psychology, medicine, the sociology of work with engineering, human factors research has developed a humanistic understanding of what constitutes humane work by setting five core criteria (e.g. Zink et al., 2021; Fischer & Zink, 2012): (1) individual health, (2) feasibility and (3) reasonableness of the work tasks to be performed, (3) worker satisfaction, and (5) social compatibility of arranging work as the core criteria for evaluating the quality of work design. Such a view also explicitly requires that any tensions and conflicts in the work process itself are resolved through dialogue with workers, collective bargaining and direct participation.
In human factors research the statutory minimum standards of the law are usually set as the ground floor, i.e. the elementary basis taken-for-granted, on which further issues are examined: From studying the design of work in factories and offices (including remote work) and investigating the human-machine interaction in collaborative robotics to research about the substantive working conditions, the quality of work, and working environments that promote individual health, learning, and development; from studying the psychosocial burdens of agile work organizations to examinations of the impacts of greater diversity at work and changing forms of contracting work.
Popular in the 1970s such a view on humane work has a long tradition, but it is also concomitant with more recent ideas of sustainable work, i.e., a work designed to make the production process socially and ecologically bearable by ensuring both, human working capacity and ecological resources in the work process (Kossek et al., 2014; Ehnert, 2012; Kramar, 2014). For businesses, aiming for current and future performance targets, work that is humane and sustainable at the same time, puts social cohesion and ecological survival at least on the same plane as corporate profits (e.g. Hahn & Tampe, 2021). In other words, work becomes both, humane and sustainable, if regeneration and reproduction are ensured in a social-ecological environment that respects the long-term economic viability of production.
Global production and international labour standards
Given its core criteria for humane work, for human factors as an academic subject there remains a lot of research work to do about international labour standards and their enforcement in global supply chains. Millions of workers worldwide work in supply chains, including subcontractors in precarious and informal work (Barrientos 2013), which effectively exclude them from their rights under the ILO conventions (ILO 2016). Although working in global supply chains does not cause labour standard violations per se, persistent and flagrant ignorance to labour standards is a reality along global supply chains, as the International Labour Organization’s reports on the state of global labour standards show. For example, goals for sustainable work are laid down in various sub-categories of Target Group 8 of the Sustainable Development Goals (ILO 2018). Nevertheless, even in the third decade of the 21st century violations of elementary labour standards and workers’ rights are reported that contradict the very idea of humane and sustainable work: child labour should have been abolished for decades, but – before the Corona pandemic – the ILO documents about 160 million children in work, i.e., persons between the ages of 5 and 17 (ILO and UNICEF 2021). Likewise, forced labor in its private and state variants should have long been a thing of the past. Nevertheless, ILO estimates see around 40 million people in forced labour, of which 15 million are in forced marriages, 16 million work in the private sector, 5 million live under forced sexual exploitation in the informal sector and 4 million are subjected to forced labour imposed by state authorities (ILO 2017). Similarly, discrimination in many workplaces remains a persistent reality (ILO 2011a), although ILO Conventions 100 and 111 provide equal treatment regardless of origin, sex, religion, or worldview. And although ILO Conventions 87 and 98 – which give workers the opportunity to organise and bargain collectively – have been in force for decades, discrimination against unionised workers persists, including detentions of organizers and other types of violent repression of workers (ITUC 2021, Kucera and Sari 2019).
For global labour standards, the social sciences have approached the ‘regulatory gap’ between the definition of rules and their implementation and enforcement primarily from a “governance” perspective. This perspective can be illustrated by the discussion about the public, private or social governance of value chains (Anner 2021). Public governance refers to the state rules that set out global labour standards and workers’ rights, which includes the implementation of the rules of international organisations – especially before the ILO – and agencies. Private governance refers to the sets of rules that companies adopt out of self-interest, which includes both corporate responsibility and collective agreements between groups of companies (clusters, industries). Finally, social governance addresses initiatives by various social groups that seek regulation; these groups are trade unions, but can also be NGOs. The manifold weaknesses of the respective regulatory attempts can be summarized as follows (Haipeter et al. 2021):
(1) Inter-organisational global production networks pose a challenge to the enforcement of labour standards along the supply chain, because legally binding responsibility for the working conditions is undermined through subcontracting across diverging national (and local) jurisdictions. The simultaneity of global integration and local dependence of the workforce in cross-border production repeatedly creates incentives to undermine standards, on the part of both, buyers and suppliers. This results in a situation of organized irresponsibility in which states, multinational companies, and suppliers escape collective responsibility for upholding labour standards,
(2) In practice, ILO labour standards do not have an immediate global effect, as they oblige individual states, but not companies. The state authorities and courts interpret this obligation differently in the light of their respective national legislation and even extend their rulings differently to different companies within a single national jurisdiction (e.g. ‘special economic zones’, Hiba et al. 2021),
(3) The “public” rules given by international labour standards are rarely sanctionable, as there is a lack of jointly agreed, widely accepted, and legally binding conflict resolution and sanction mechanisms operating across borders. Those mechanisms that do exist such as the so-called national contact points of the OECD are limited in their scope and leverage (for a critical discussion see Ford and Gillan 2021). This is also because differences of power and interests persist in global value chains which favour the emergence of ad hoc coalitions in favour of the status quo,
(4) Public regulations do not necessarily connect with private initiatives such as corporate responsibility, voluntary commitment, or auditing into an integrated whole (Haipeter et al. 2021); the set of rules resemble more a group of fragments that may bring isolated solutions (e.g. Bangladesh-Accord, for many Schüßler et al., 2019; or the “better work” program ILO 2016b), which are only slowly imitated elsewhere and in other industries,
(5) Existing public, private and social control and implementation instruments remain deficient, since these do not cover global supply chains in their entirety, are limited in their design, take too little account of the requirements for action of the local suppliers or cannot be used by the local workers. For example, social auditing in its current forms has been criticized for various conceptual, procedural and content-related shortcomings (Kuruvilla 2021; Fransen & LeBaron 2019, DeColle et al. 2014). At the same time, state-run labour inspectorates are underfunded and under-staffed, struggle with fragmented jurisdictions of single authorities, and the priorities set for cross-border collaboration among agencies (Quinlan and Sheldon 2011; Walters 2016; ILO 2011a),
(6) Last, but not least often, oppression and impairment of trade unions and civil society organizations is observed at the local level, so that in various countries social initiatives by independent unions and workers lack influence to uphold labour standards on their own (but see Fine, 2017 for the USA).
The potential contributions of a global human factors research
In contrast to such a governance view, human factors and ergonomics research start from the work performed in factories and elsewhere. Considering the observation of persistent standard violations in global supply chains in connection with the shortcomings identified in the governance literature, the question arises what work design and human factors can bring to the table (Zink, 2017). So, how can the enforcement of global labour standards in supply chains be improved through the insights from human factors research? Human factors can bring three extensions to the governance perspective: (1) a view of sustainable work that – beyond the mere absence of standard violations in everyday work – also takes seriously the positive development opportunities of people in their work; (2) an analysis of cause-and-effect relationships that go beyond the institutional design of rules, e.g. the direct observation of occupational health effects instead of the evaluation of third-party observations; and (3) the consideration of work organisation in supply chains in order to eliminate standard violations from the outset.
For achieving a precautionary design of sustainable work in the global supply chain, a central contribution of human factors is to consider the processes and practices with which work is designed: Which actors use which practices and do what exactly with what consequences? The governance discussion here focuses very much on designing procedures, ratings and monitoring, but the question is precisely what can be done to close the “implementation gap” on the shopfloor in practice. Obviously, more empirical research is needed which clarifies with a clear view on health and safety, work content, and work intensity the interplay of “Who?”, “What?”, “When?”, “How?” and “With what effect?” in global supply chains. This is a necessary analytical step so that companies and businesses can move from measuring the problem and its causes to implementing practices that provide an effective remedy in daily work routines (Helfen et al. 2018). First instruments are already available: social life cycle analyses of production and work processes (Zink et al. 2021), cooperation between procurement and production in process design along the supply chain up to the development of supplier companies (Yawar and Seuring 2017) and the consideration of HRM in supplier relationships (Fisher et al. 2010). In addition to turning to cross-border phenomena themselves, this requires also the extension of human factors research towards international comparison. Of course, reflecting upon organizational, societal, and environmental contexts additional research questions concern the field of cultural and institutional comparisons of work design, occupational safety, accident prevention, and health protection.
Building on a quantitative-technical approach and a heuristic view of processes and practices, human factors seems particularly suitable to help close the gap between the rules and reality of global labour standards. Auditing according to socio-technical standards is an example, especially in the areas of quality (ISO 9001), environmental issues (ISO 14001) as well as health and safety (ISO 45001) or corporate responsibility (ISO 26001) (Zink et al. 2021). To be accredited according to these or similar standards, a company must demonstrate that the processes and responsibilities defined in the respective standard are adhered to. This is usually checked in an audit conducted by a private accreditation agency. The checking for these standards can help to reduce breaches of labour standards in the supply chain and thus reduce fatal accidents, work-related illnesses or environmental damage (e.g. Lim & Prakash 2017). This shows that there is a potential to improve work in supply chains, at least where companies involved are actively participating in the fulfilment of social due diligence obligations. In this view, human factors research can also identify economic advantages of a humane work design in supply chains. Examples are the relationship between humane work and the quality of service as well as the reliability of processes in the supply chains (Bird et al. 2019). Another example is the use of technological innovations to improve the quality of work.
At times, human factors research and practice have been criticized for investigating matters through a company lens, because research often builds on management granting access to work sites and data collection. To balance this bias, involvement of workers and their unions as experts on their own behalf is key (Outwaite und Martín-Ortega 2019, Camuffo et al. 2017). In addition, the question needs to be raised as to how human factors and ergonomics can give more weight to its voice by considering its own institutional possibilities of influence. In other words, how can human factors research bring its knowledge more strongly into the political process. In many areas, after all, there is already many findings about human factors and the design of humane and sustainable work which still need to be made fruitful in global supply chains. However, getting across these findings is a political and institutional mediation challenge. The voice of human factors research should better be listened to and taken more often into account on cross-border issues and when new regulatory instruments like the Supply Chain Acts are negotiated.
*This is a shortened and adapted translation of Helfen, M. (2022). Global Labour Standards and Ergonomics: How to continue on the way to sustainable work in global supply chains? Zeitschrift für Arbeitswissenschaft, DOI 10.1007/s41449-022-00322-w
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