NABET, NABET 2016 Conference

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Corporate Social Responsibility: Bringing the fair-trade Designation to Other Industries
Bronwyn M. Laughner

Last modified: 2017-03-25

Abstract


Corporate social responsibility is an area burgeoning interest as corporations face increasing pressure to ensure ethical, fair and humane treatment of workers in their supply chains. While companies in the coffee and chocolate industries are pioneers in this movement with their fair-trade practices, other industries, particularly the garment industries are slow to embrace transparency and accountability throughout their supply chains. One company, LaborVoices, is utilizing crowdsourcing to gather real-time, worker data to feed back to upstream supply chain partners on worker conditions, operations in the plant and labor practices. Two questions we will examine in depth are, does a fair-trade designation carry sufficient weight with the consumer to justify the cost (McEachern, 2015) and can the fair-trade designation be useful in other industries (Steinmeyer, 2016).


Keywords


Corporate social responsbility, crowd-sourcing, supply chain