U.K. Employment Rights Bill promises to thwart forced labor through new consolidated regulator

For the past decade, the United Kingdom has tried to make companies more directly accountable for forced labor in their supply chains. But lawyers warn that the government’s latest plans to beef up protections against worker violations risk being heavily watered down and poorly policed by regulators.

Last month, a U.K. Parliamentary committee met to look into how companies ensure there are no labor violations in their supply chains as part of evidence gathering for the U.K.’s planned Employment Rights Bill–a wide-sweeping piece of legislation that aims to provide workers with better workplace protections both at home and through supply chains. As part of the process, the Chinese fashion retailer Shein was called to provide evidence, but its senior legal counsel for Europe, Yinan Zhu, tried to stonewall the committee and could not/would not answer where the company sourced cotton from (widely suspected to be from China’s Xinjiang region and via forced Uyghur labor), which didn’t go down well with regulators. They accused Zhu of ”wilful ignorance” and said she had “given us almost zero confidence in the integrity of your supply chains.” Shein is hoping to get a U.K. listing.

The bill–which if passed would not come into effect until 2026–will introduce a new regulator called the Fair Work Agency (FWA). The FWA intends to combine under one enforcement body the powers of various authorities operating to investigate forms of labor exploitation, including the Gangmasters and Abuse Authority, HM Revenue and Customs National Minimum Wage Unit, and the Employment Agency Standard Inspectorate. This move aims to redress the current state of arrangements to investigate labor exploitation cases, which experts say remains under-resourced and fragmented.