Modern slavery disclosure regulations in the global supply Chain: A world-systems perspective

Abstract

This study provides a linguistic analysis of three modern slavery disclosure regulations, the California Transparency in the Supply Chain Act (CTSCA) 2010, section 54 of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the Australian Modern Slavery Act 2018. These regulations require companies to report their actions to tackle labour exploitation within global supply chains. Based on World-System Theory (WST: Wallerstein, 1975, 1979, 2015) and by relying on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we examined the disclosure regulations and found that the texts of and discourses around the regulations are not neutral and allow social wrongs to continue in global supply chains. Although regulators claim modern slavery disclosure regulations to be a step in the right direction, our investigation reveals a different picture: the linguistic features of the regulations support the perpetuating risk of modern slavery in global supply chains based in the periphery countries. We argue that changing the current global power structure/system is necessary to address the grand challenges of regulating modern slavery. There is a need for disclosure regime that can protect vulnerable communities, including workers in the global supply chains.