Excerto:
«As consumers and
individuals, we have the right to know the source of the things we buy or the
uniforms we wear. For many of us, the trust we have in a retailer, brand or
employer might be sufficient to stop us from asking too many questions and
leave us free to go on living our lives.
However,
for businesses things are trickier. They need to substantiate the trust they
place in their supply chain with hard evidence and robust information. They
need to know the answers to our questions should we ask them. And as with any
other risk on a company’s risk register, they need to understand the scale and
potential for impact of the risk.
In
reality, a supply chain is far from neat and tidy which presents a challenge
for business. Let us take a t-shirt as an example. What oversight do we expect businesses’
to have of the practices of the retailer where they buy their finished t-shirt?
What about the manufacturer of the t-shirt? Or the trader that purchased the
fabric before that? How about the mill that produced the fabric? Lastly, what
about the labour conditions of the person picking the cotton on the farm a
million miles away? (...)».
