Modern slavery is a business decision, Surrey researchers argue in supply-chain study

On 14 July 2026, researchers at the University of Surrey published a study arguing that the persistence of modern slavery in global commerce is not an unfortunate by-product of complex supply chains but an outcome those chains are engineered to produce. The paper, led by Professor Glenn Parry of the University of Surrey with Dr. Mike Bernon among the co-authors, frames modern slavery as a deliberate business decision hiding in plain sight, sustained by procurement structures that reward opacity.

The thesis is simple and uncomfortable: if multinational buyers wanted to stop modern slavery, the tools already exist. They have existed for years. What is missing is the incentive to use them, because the cost of forced labour is borne by workers at the bottom of the chain, while the savings accrue to firms at the top. The Surrey team argues the architecture of contemporary sourcing is the cover, not the obstacle.

How the chains are built to hide

The study's central observation is structural. Tier-1 suppliers are visible: they sign the contracts, sit in the audit reports, and appear in corporate sustainability disclosures. Tier-2 and tier-3 suppliers, where raw materials are processed and finished, are where the risk concentrates and the visibility collapses. Subcontracting cascades push production into informal workshops, home-based work, and migrant-labour arrangements that no audit schedule realistically reaches.

That opacity is not accidental, the authors argue. It is the predictable result of three procurement habits: aggressive cost-down targets set by buying teams compensated on margin, lead times that make ethical sourcing impossible, and a preference for suppliers willing to absorb shocks without complaint. A supplier who pushes back on a price cut or a rushed order loses the next contract. A supplier who quietly extends hours, hires undocumented migrants, or locks workers in a dormitory keeps it. The market selects for compliance theatre, not compliance.

The counter-argument from the buying desk

The defence from procurement professionals is well-rehearsed and not without force. Modern slavery statutes such as the UK's 2015 Act place liability on the buying company only when it cannot show "reasonable" due diligence. Audits exist, supplier codes exist, whistleblowing channels exist. When abuse is found, it is treated as a supplier failure and the supplier is exited. The system, in this telling, is working as designed.

The Surrey research pushes back on exactly that framing. Exit-the-supplier responses treat the symptom at one node while leaving the incentive structure intact. The next supplier, drawn from the same pool and competing on the same terms, arrives with the same pressure to cut corners. Exit without redesign is what Parry and Bernon describe as a treadmill: visible action, unchanged outcomes. The audit industry, they note, has matured into a multi-billion-pound sector whose revenue depends on the problem recurring.

Why disclosure has not changed the maths

Mandatory modern-slavery statements, now required in several jurisdictions, have produced thousands of pages of corporate disclosure and very few prosecutions. The Surrey team reads that gap as evidence rather than failure of effort. Disclosure asks firms to describe their processes. It does not ask them to alter the procurement economics that produce the abuse in the first place. A statement that lists audits, training, and supplier codes can be filed by a company whose buying practices continue to make those instruments unworkable on the ground.

This is the structural point that separates the paper from most corporate-responsibility commentary. The choice to pay a subcontractor 30 per cent below a living-wage benchmark is not a neutral market signal; it is a price that, in the sectors studied, can only be met by some combination of unpaid overtime, informal hiring, and worker captivity. The researchers stop short of imputing intent to individual buyers, but they argue that intent is the wrong question. The system produces the outcome regardless of what any one procurement manager believes about ethics.

What would actually change the calculation

The paper's policy section is where its analytical edge meets practical resistance. The authors identify four levers that would shift incentives rather than paperwork. First, joint and several liability that survives supplier exit, so the buying company cannot offload risk by terminating a contract. Second, procurement KPIs rewritten so that margin is no longer the only metric that determines buyer bonuses. Third, sectoral bargaining that lifts the floor on price for the bottom tiers, the way agricultural quotas have in some commodities. Fourth, public procurement leverage: when governments are the largest single buyer in a sector, their terms dictate the market.

None of these is novel in isolation. What is novel is treating them as a package rather than a menu, and treating the buying firm's incentive structure as the unit of intervention rather than the supplier's workshop.

Stakes and what to watch

The practical stakes are concentrated in three places. For investors, the question is whether forthcoming EU supply-chain due-diligence rules will move from disclosure to liability in a way the UK framework has not. For procurement teams, the question is whether cost-down targets negotiated at category level will be revisited in light of risk pricing. For workers at the deep tiers of garment, electronics, agriculture, and seafood, the question is whether any of the above arrives in their pay packet before the next audit cycle.

What remains genuinely contested is whether the Surrey framing holds across sectors. The study's evidence base sits heavily in apparel and food, where tier-2 opacity is well-documented. Mining and heavy manufacturing have different structures, with fewer but larger nodes and different audit economics. The authors acknowledge this is a partial map. The harder question, which their framework invites but does not answer, is whether any buyer in a competitive market can unilaterally raise the floor on price without offshoring the problem to a jurisdiction with weaker enforcement. The model says yes; the historical record on unilateral corporate ethics in price-sensitive categories is, charitably, mixed.

The paper's contribution is to make that mixed record legible as a design choice rather than a tragedy of the commons. Modern slavery persists, on this reading, because the people who could change the conditions of purchase have built careers, bonuses, and corporate disclosures around not changing them. The research does not call them villains. It calls the architecture what it is, and leaves the rest to the reader.

Desk note: Monexus has framed the Surrey study as a structural critique of procurement economics rather than a story about a few bad factories. The wire lede tended to spotlight the "modern slavery as business decision" line; the analytical weight sits in the tier-by-tier opacity argument that follows it.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/contents
• https://ec.europa.eu/commission/topics/strengthening-european-industrial-competitiveness/eu-supply-chain-due-diligence_en