Building Sustainable Supply Chains with Blockchain

Many workers around the world lack mechanisms to safely and confidentially advocate for change or voice concerns related to their work, safety, health and overall well-being. According to the World Health Organization, over 50% of workers in many countries have no social protection and are subject to lax enforcement of occupational health and safety standards.

These challenges are particularly acute in the apparel industry, where marginalized populations often lack safe and secure means to address problems with their quality of life and well-being. Nearly all clothing brands lack a comprehensive view of factory conditions and a mechanism to combine well-being insights with business data to make ethical supply chains competitive. Fragmented information about the apparel value chain and efforts to protect the privacy of workers often prevent researchers from building effective interventions to improve factory production and worker quality of life.

Over the past two years, our team at New America worked with a coalition of business, NGO, tech, and academia leaders to develop a blockchain-powered solution to assess health and working conditions in supply chains. Levi Strauss Co, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s SHINE initiative at Harvard, and ConsenSys collaborated to develop a new approach to factory worker well-being assessments. By integrating the SHINE Well-being Survey into a secure blockchain platform that can be deployed in-person or remotely, workers are empowered to safely share their workplace experiences. New America convened an online event on March 31st to present on overview on this work. You can see the recording here and the slides presented during the event below.

The pilot solution designed through the course of this work, Survey Assure, uploads well-being survey responses onto the Ethereum blockchain. Storing survey data on the decentralized blockchain not only encrypts data to protect the identity of participants, but prevents unauthorized manipulation of data to guarantee it’s authenticity. Anyone, including workers, can audit the data to verify that the information reflected in the well-being assessment comes from their individual survey submissions.

Survey Assure is also flexible and replicable. Any brand interested in adapting the tool for their own survey or data sources, or for different devices like computers, tablets or mobile phones, can do so thanks to flexible APIs and open source licensing. This adaptability was crucial in our pilot development when, due to public health and travel concerns related to the pandemic, our coalition pivoted to remotely administered surveys in Poland in 2020 after conducting in-person surveys in Mexico in 2019.

Blockchain introduces a transformative new approach for all stakeholders by integrating trust and democratizing data. Rather than waiting weeks for survey results, factory leadership and workers can assess survey results in near real-time, providing unprecedented levels of transparency. Offering workers an opportunity to see their responses and the collective voice of their colleagues, particularly when they share sensitive information on difficult topics, is empowering. Workers are important stakeholders and partners in building more effective and fulfilling work environments.

The Survey Assure prototype is a crucial first step in the transparent evaluation of working conditions, improving well-being and fostering trust between brands, factory leadership and workers. The moonshot goal is to not only store well-being data on blockchain, but to incorporate data on business practices and organizational resources to create an end-to-end view of the experiences of workers across the value chain. By utilizing blockchain to aggregate different data sources in a secure and privacy-preserving way, brands and consumers can make more informed decisions on improving workplace conditions, purchasing products, and building more ethical and sustainable value chains across global industries.

Blockchain is certainly not always the technology needed for all social innovation challenges, but when applied to solutions that benefit from its decentralized and immutable characteristics, coalitions can build greater transparency and accountability rooted in trusted data. New America is committed to exploring the use of emerging technologies like blockchain to solve public challenges. Be sure to read our Blueprint for Blockchain + Social Innovation and our repository of blockchain projects that advance public interest for more information.