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Nine out of ten businesses acknowledge modern slavery in their supply chains. Yet Hult International Business School's research suggests most treat it as a reporting obligation rather than a material business risk requiring systemic change.
This is the greenwashing question in plaintext: if 90% of organisations know slavery is happening in their supply chains, why does the needle barely move on actual remediation?
The answer is structural. Compliance-driven due diligence becomes a document exercise – an audit checklist, a supplier questionnaire, a modern slavery statement ticked off under governance. The organisations that know slavery exists but still operate business-as-usual are not ignorant. They're choosing efficiency over accountability.
There's a difference between reporting that slavery exists somewhere in your supply chain and designing your procurement, auditing, and remediation processes to eliminate it. One satisfies regulators. The other requires redesign.
The gap between knowledge and action also reflects a deeper problem: many organisations still see human rights due diligence as a legal or PR function rather than a core business control. Supply chain slavery is treated like a legacy risk – something to acknowledge and manage down, not something that questions whether your business model is viable at all.
This matters because it exposes the limits of disclosure alone. The UK Modern Slavery Act, the proposed German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act, and emerging mandatory reporting regimes assume transparency drives behaviour change. The evidence suggests it doesn't – not when compliance costs less than remediation.
The real test isn't what businesses report knowing. It's whether 90% are restructuring procurement timelines, unit economics, or supplier relationships to make slavery economically unviable. Evidence from Hult suggests the answer is no.