The fact that these companies aren’t immediately shouted down for asking “do I really need to investigate for slavery in this part of our supply chain” is a bit telling in it’s own right.
If raping babies to death had a good RoI at scale, you know corporations would open a department.
But, I can see things like “We have an old tool that everyone in the shop uses, and we can only get batteries from China, and we only get the batteries once every 2 years; do we need to investigate?” being a valid thing to ask.
Because the poor little corporation couldn’t possibly source another tool, or develop another manufacturing process.
The key word is “little”, I think. Corporations come in all sizes, right down to one-man shows that have incorporated to reduce financial liability. If you’ve got three hundred employees, then yeah, you can probably afford to replace that one tool. If you’re a three-man shop that doesn’t make enough profit in a year to buy a new car, maybe not so much.
There are also going to be cases where all the possible replacements have the same issue as the original problem tool.
If you actually read this, this is just people being unclear on how to do the paperwork, including people who do have a report ready but are now being told they don’t have to. Pitchforks down.
I hope this law is why I’ve noticed Rainforest Alliance seals on cheaper chocolate brands recently and not that Rainforest Alliance has lowered their standards. (I looked it up a year or two ago and RA’s site explicitly stated that they don’t allow the seal to be used if they’re aware of worker exploitation.) I guess it must be a lot cheaper for corpos to get that on their labels than if they used the Fair Trade seal.