"Working conditions are often defined by institutions, but when you speak about dignity, it's usually defined by workers. What dignity means and what good working conditions are like should [both] be defined by the workers themselves,” asserts Professor Vivek Soundararajan.

With 27.6 million people living under conditions of forced labour, according to the International Labour Organization, the issue of dignity in the workplace is perhaps more urgent than ever before. Vivek leads Embed Dignity, a research initiative based at the School of Management that aims to improve conditions across all facets of organisations.

He continues: “For instance, I’ve researched a new type of agreement that emerged against sexual harassment within garment industries, which a lot of brands and suppliers have signed. We’re looking to understand what happened here and how, in a context where extreme forms of patriarchy persist, how women workers could actually come together and make brands and suppliers sign a particular agreement.

"I feel that this is a good example of why we should give [this voice] to workers, because many rights or standards may not always cover everything they see as being violated.”

Vivek has been researching exploitation in global supply chains and how it can be addressed for more than a decade. His work has focused on a range of areas, including the garment and software industries in both India and the UK.

One of his current research interests turns the lens to caste, a form of traditional social stratification in South Asia that has a pervasive socio-economic influence to this day.

As part of an effort to address this, Vivek is one of the organisers of The Global Research Conference on Caste, Business and Society, an annual conference bringing together scholars in the field.

The conference was held here at the School of Management in June 2024, bringing together around 50 attendees from across the globe to discuss topics such as the influence of caste on access to entrepreneurial finance, exclusion in the workplace and how business can resulted in tackle caste.

How elements of oppression fit together rather than standing alone is a key theme in Vivek’s work. “For example, in our research, we are trying to change the way [people view] working conditions [to] a systemic issue,” he says.

This approach has also informed a recent project with Dr Pankhuri Agarwal, a Research Associate in the School and fellow member of Embed Dignity.

Investigating scandals

Vivek and Pankhuri were part of a team that investigated the aftermath of the 2020 Boohoo scandal, in which a Times exposé uncovered large-scale labour exploitation in the fast-fashion retailer’s factories in Leicester. Authorities swiftly clamped down on the factories in question, and Boohoo moved its production abroad.

The team spent four months in the city during 2023 carrying out interviews and focus groups with affected people, and what they found was that government interventions were essentially no more than a sticking plaster.

“Most of the solutions for modern slavery are directed towards rescue and rehabilitation,” Pankhuri asserts, “but nobody really knows what happens to these people after they're rescued.”

For the people who had been working in these garment factories, their situation hadn’t improved. While some, predominantly men, had found other work, this was largely precarious: “Many of them became taxi drivers or are working in food factories. A lot of the workers [are now] unemployed and have nowhere else to go.”

Pankhuri notes that cultural and geographical factors also both play a role. Many of these unemployed garment workers are South Asian women, who lived in close proximity to the now-closed factories. Other factories are situated further from residential areas, making them unsuitable for women with childcare responsibilities or who lack suitable transport.

What’s more, it’s not just employment they’re now missing out on: for many of them it’s also the sense of community and belonging that came along with it.

Government interventions may have addressed the immediate outrage of the human rights abuses being perpetrated in Leicester’s garment factories, but they have effectively stripped people of choices. Instead, Pankhuri believes that more should be invested in community-based solutions at a local level, such as women’s centres. More attention also needs to be paid to the wider social issues that render people vulnerable to labour exploitation in the first place.

“What happened in Leicester was not so surprising for someone who has been researching the issue,” says Pankhuri. “Also, in the context of the UK, it is surprising that these interventions did not actually talk about the root issues, such as the high cost of living, the energy crisis and Universal Credit. The whole target was to remove this imagined villain who is a slave master and to rescue the slaves.”

Dr Johanne Grosvold uncovered similar issues during a recent project on the intersections between climate change, modern slavery and public procurement. “The challenge that we came across was that there was not a great deal of understanding of what to do if you spotted modern slavery,” she says.

“A lot of people instantly, instinctively, think to call the police or include the authorities, but actually that can undermine it. If [the perpetrator] becomes aware of it, then they can just move the person to somewhere else.”

Johanne partnered with the Modern Slavery & Human Rights Policy & Evidence Centre, London Universities Purchasing Consortium and charity Unseen UK, as well as colleagues from the Universities of Sussex and the West of England, to carry out more than 70 hours of interviews with public sector procurement professionals.

“We talked to them about what their priorities were, what they think about modern slavery, how they see it as a problem, and the ways in which they are able to – and are finding it harder to – facilitate change,” she explains. She points out that, unlike the private sector, organisations in the public sector are able to team up via purchasing consortia.

This means they are more able to apply pressure to suppliers to change their practices around climate change and human rights abuses – which then, Johanne believes, will have a domino effect that also has a positive impact on the private sector.

The resulting research report and policy briefing were launched at a discussion and networking event for practitioners in London in February 2024.

Some of the key recommendations arising from the project were the implementation of different forms of training for staff based on their role and likelihood of encountering victims of modern slavery; stronger tendering requirements for public sector contracts; and the introduction of processes to actively manage known risks, such as the electronics supply chain.

Johanne also argues that the UK Government needs to develop a clear mandate across the public sector to address the issue:

“At the moment, I think in principle, you can be fined if you don't have a modern slavery statement on your company’s home page. But as far as I know, there haven't been any fines handed out and so there isn't much by way of direct concrete repercussions.”

“What the European Union is trying to do is to move beyond window dressing and to make it more incumbent on companies to supply data that enables you to see whether they are [addressing such issues],” she continues. “They're trying to create accountability by increasing transparency.”

Professor Andrew Crane, Director of the School’s Centre for Business, Organisations and Society, agrees that modern slavery is a highly politicised issue.

He calls attention to the fact that the wording of the UK’s Modern Slavery Act, which passed into law in 2015, was hotly debated:

“If you are a child rights organisation, if you're protecting refugees, if your work is dealing with sex workers, if you're dealing with domestic workers, do you want those types of actors to be included within this [new] category of modern slavery or not? And so my research looked at how different organisations framed what they were doing in terms of modern slavery to try to become a member of the category or to be excluded from it.”

He continues: “For businesses, they don't really want to be associated with modern slavery, so it can often make sense to talk about how modern slavery is not about a business issue. But if you're a child rights organisation, the first draft of the Act didn't include children as a specific category, so there was an incentive to try to get them included.”

Scroll through images from the Crossing Boundaries Conference in the above gallery.

Andrew has been researching business and modern slavery for more than a decade, and has seen the field grow rapidly since his first paper in the discipline.

“I tried to develop a business and management approach to modern slavery,” he explains. “I took it to a conference and I thought, ‘What are they going to say to this business person doing research about this?’ I thought they'd just laugh at me, to be honest, but it really struck a chord with a lot of people.”

In September 2023, Andrew brought together the largest ever gathering of business and modern slavery researchers and practitioners for Crossing Boundaries: The 2023 Business and Modern Slavery Research Conference, with over 80 academics and other experts in attendance.

“The real idea was to bring these people together,” he says.

“The conference is called Crossing Boundaries because we wanted to cross a bunch of boundaries – between disciplines, between different ways of doing research, between research and practice."

One example of this was the launch of Objective, a powerful photography exhibition that blurs the boundaries between art and research to communicate affecting stories.

Created by former School of Management PhD student Emma Barnes Lewis; photojournalist Amy Romer; and Maya Esslemont, director of human rights charity After Exploitation, it combines survivors’ first-hand testimony with images of their personal belongings.

“We want to help people develop better research, whatever that means,” concludes Andrew. “Whether it's better in terms of its scholarly credentials, better in terms of its practical application or better in terms of its real-world impact.”

Despite its global relevance, research into business and society remains frustratingly dominated by scholars in higher income countries. Launched in spring 2024 under the leadership of Professor and Deputy Director of Centre for Business, Organisations and Society (CBOS), Vivek Soundararajan, our new, annual Global Early-Career Accelerator for Representation (GEAR) programme is working to change that.

CBOS ran the programme’s pilot for seven weeks across April and May 2024. Through a weekly series of online sessions, the Centre's academics guided early-career researchers in low-and-middle income countries through the development of high-quality papers for top journals.

Our 2024 cohort comprised 19 researchers from a wide range of countries, including Brazil, Colombia, India, Morocco, Pakistan and Tanzania. After completing the programme, participants were given the opportunity to apply for a GEAR fellowship, which will provide a term of in-person CBOS mentorship at the School of Management.