Industry’s engagement with and response to the development of modern slavery acts in Australia, France, and the UK

End date: 1 January 2021
Principal investigator: Professor Hinrich Voss
Co-investigators: Dr Matthew Davis (Socio-Technical Centre); Mark Sumner (School of Design, University of Leeds)
External co-investigators: Dr Fiona McGaughey, Senior Lecturer at the Law School; Professor Holly Cullen, Adjunct Professor of Law, both at University of Western Australia (UWA), Perth and part of the Modern Slavery Research Cluster
Postgraduate students: Peta-Jane Hogg (UWA)

Description

The UK’s Modern Slavery Act came into force in 2015 and was the first comprehensive, contemporary legislation to add forms of modern slavery. The French and Australian legislators have built on the UK experience and developed their own legislations.

Businesses that operate across all three jurisdictions now have to operationally and structurally address three Acts that have the same objective but diverging processes to achieve it. The objective of the project is therefore to understand how businesses that operate across these three countries have engaged in the legislation process in an attempt to shape the legislations to reduce compliance variation and how they have afterwards addressed the Acts through operational and structural changes.

We use secondary sources including the legal texts, public consultation and submission, company reports and statements and complement these with interviews.