Digitalizisation has potential to revolutionize labour rights training
Digital-training method has indeed potential to revolutionize common issues encountered by traditional corporate-self regulation tools in global supply chains. Thats the bottom line in the recently published paper "Labour rights training 2.0: The digitalisation of knowledge for workers in global supply chains" by Clara My Lernborg and Tina Sendlhofer, PhD sudents at Misum. (Download the article here.)
- However, several barriers remain, such as the accessibility for the worker and willingness of the factory management remain, and inadequate regulations, says the researchers.
What do you make of the results?
- As our findings are based on qualitative data, such as in-depth interviews, the generalizability therefor has to be taken into consideration. Nevertheless, we find that given the novelty of this practice/phenomenon, it provides a first insight into the possibilities of improving social sustainability such as labour rights through digital means.
The study is highly relevant for both academia and practice, says Clara My and Tina.
- One important contribution to literature is the exploration of the aspect of the digitalization of knowledge on labour rights. Also practitioners can draw learnings from our research paper. While traditional training methods can be costly and difficult to organize, the digitalization of labour rights trainings can be an interesting complementary tool to ensure retention of knowledge between scheduled trainings. However, corporate governance issues, such as willingness of factory management or absence of work place dialogue, remain.
What is next?
- We plan to develop our study and explore further the views of the factory management on the digitalization of labour rights trainings.
For more information contact:
Clara My Lernborg: claramy.lernborg@phdstudent.hhs.se
Tina Sendlhofer: tina.sendlhofer@phdstudent.hhs.se
Abstract:
There are manifold social sustainability issues in global supply chains (GSC), the question is whether digital-training can address them. For a long time, auditing, compliance and monitoring have been seen as key in solving labour right violations. Yet, little improvement has happened. More participative methods of auditing and training have therefore been proposed in order to remedy this situation. The purpose of this paper is to explore how workers are trained on their labour rights with a digital-training method. We present an in-depth case study of a digitalising labour rights training through a new-to-the-world training method aimed at reaching factory workers in the GSC context. The digital-training method is custom-designed in an application. It aims at encouraging and stimulating learning-processes, as well as at retaining knowledge on relevant labour right topics, guided by the local needs of the worker. We find that this digital-training method has indeed potential to revolutionise common issues encountered by traditional corporate-self regulation tools in GSCs. However, potential barriers, such as the accessibility for the worker and willingness of the factory management remain.
