The Modern Slavery, Justice and Complex Supply Chains Knowledge and Action Hub aims to bring together a breadth of inter-disciplinary expertise across Lancaster University that seeks to better embed social sustainability within both global and local complex supply chains. The hub will provide a forum for research collaboration on how to enhance business governance systems that embody the principle of justice and lead to solutions co-created with industry to further combat ‘modern slavery’ – noting that this principally takes the form of ‘forced labour’ in this context.

The Hub builds on the expertise of researchers from the Departments of Management Science (Linda Hendry, Mark Stevenson, Ophelia Chidgey), Accounting and Finance (Jan Bebbington, Steve Young, Mahmoud Gad), Organisation Work and Technology (Divya Jyoti, Huw Fearnall-Williams), Law (Rafael Savva), Computing and Communications (Oliver Bates) and from both our Leipzig (Constantin Blome) and Sunway (Stephen Homer) campuses. Collectively, our research includes: methods of detecting and remediating against modern slavery in global supply chains including the textiles, fishing and conflict minerals industries; and assessing the impact of modern slavery legislation which requires organisations to produce annual modern slavery statements. Ongoing research continues, such as assessing the working conditions of migrant workers, and the social sustainability of the ‘left behind’ places where migrant workers have settled but have yet to flourish in both their workplaces and communities.

We plan to expand the network to organisations external to Lancaster University – both industrial and academic.