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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.