Workforce Health Across the Value Chain 2025

The nature of supply-chain sourcing and procurement necessitates such collective action. Global supply chains are highly interconnected, with individual production facilities often serving multiple buyers simultaneously. This structural feature creates both a challenge and an opportunity: while it can diffuse accountability and hinder direct oversight, it also opens the door to joint investments in worker well-being and environmental resilience that benefit multiple brands at once. Many industries, especially electronics, apparel and automotive, rely heavily on contract manufacturing models, where third-party firms (e.g. Foxconn, Pegatron, Wistron) produce goods for several multinational clients. A single factory line may shift from assembling Apple iPhones to HP laptops or Sony components within a short time frame. This structure creates the opportunity for shared investment in worker-centred interventions. Because factories serve multiple clients, health and safety investments can deliver cross-brand impact. A number of notable companies are already acting on this logic: –In 2021, Apple, Dell and HP became founding signatories of the Toward Zero Exposure initiative coordinated by the Clean Electronics Production Network (CEPN).141 This precompetitive collaboration seeks to eliminate worker exposure to hazardous chemicals in electronics manufacturing by promoting chemical substitutions, better safety protocols and supplier accountability through transparent reporting. It reflects a growing trend among brands to jointly address systemic risks that no single actor can tackle alone. –The Responsible Business Alliance (RBA), a leading industry coalition of electronics, retail, car and toy companies, offers a complementary model of precompetitive collaboration. The RBA develops and enforces a common code of conduct for labour, health and safety, environmental and ethical standards across global supply chains. Its members – ranging from Dell and HP to Microsoft, Cisco and Panasonic – collectively conduct supplier audits, provide joint training programmes and support shared assessments of working conditions. The RBA’s Worker Well- being initiative extends beyond compliance to focus on worker voice, access to health services and improved communication between workers and management.142 –Initiatives such as the Action for Sustainable Derivatives (ASD) have institutionalized precompetitive collaboration as a proactive strategy.143,144 ASD supports traceability, grievance mechanisms and sustainable sourcing across palm oil supply chains that serve multiple sectors. Rather than focusing solely on individual supplier contracts, it aligns brands on common mapping tools and action frameworks, showing how long-term market transformation is possible when companies recognize their shared stake in upstream labour and environmental risks. While these coalitions have made important progress in advancing worker safety, labour rights and improving working conditions, there remains an opportunity to integrate healthcare access more fully into collaborative models, including preventive care, occupational health services and medical support for both acute and chronic needs. Expanding the definition of worker well-being to include not just safer working conditions but also meaningful access to health services would ensure that efforts to protect workers are both comprehensive and sustained. System-level threats demand coordinated responses that go beyond the factory gate. This means co-investing not only in protective infrastructure and supply-chain technologies but also in the social and civic ecosystems that anchor production, logistics and labour markets. Place-based solutions and figuring out how to marshal community-based organizations, companies big and small and government are critical to replicability and scalability. It’s usually through coalitions like that, built at the local level and driven by the local level, that you can actually invest in capacity-building. This produces better results than that old school, ‘let’s zoom in and throw a bunch of money at something’. Cynthia Hansen, Managing Director, Innovation Foundation empowered by the Adecco Group Workforce Health Across the Value Chain: Organizational Insights to Mitigate Risk and Create Sustainable Growth 27