Overview

Drawing on the experience of practitioners and leading experts, this session examines why worker participation, collective bargaining, and responsible purchasing practices are critical to translating corporate climate ambitions into meaningful outcomes for workers. Often missing from transition strategies, or critically undermined in commercial decisions, these foundations are essential for ensuring that climate action is both fair and effective.

Business and Human Rights Centre (BHRC) research shows that when brands pursue climate or commercial objectives without aligning them to supplier capacity or facilitating worker participation, the costs are shifted downstream. Workers face heightened precarity, suppliers face impossible demands, and companies undermine their own climate and human rights goals. The result is not resilience, but widening inequality. Without a basis in responsible purchasing practices and social dialogue, due diligence becomes a retrospective, box ticking exercise that treats symptoms rather than causes.

Anchored in the Forum’s themes of “resilient markets and supply chains” and “inclusion, participation and protection,” the session will explore how advancing rights is not separate from building resilience—it is the foundation. And without embedding workers’ voices and responsible purchasing practices into climate policies and sourcing strategies, corporate climate ambition will continue to outpace the practical support required for a just and durable transition.

Why it matters

This conversation is important because migrant workers are frequently viewed through a protection lens, while their contributions to workforce resilience, skills development and economic growth receive less attention. The session will explore how rights-based labour mobility systems can better recognize and leverage migrant workers' skills and experience while advancing inclusion and meeting evolving labour market needs.

Key questions

The session seeks to explore and challenge prevailing narratives that treat climate action and commercial imperatives as separate from human rights responsibilities. Instead, it will explore how resilience is built when companies integrate climate, commercial and human rights strategies—supported by purchasing practices that enable suppliers to plan, invest and protect workers.

• The intersection between commercial pressures and human rights risks—and how responsible purchasing practices are essential to advancing climate transition plans while maintaining decent work.

• Social dialogue and worker driven monitoring—creating safe, enabling environments for workers to identify risks, shape transition plans and engage meaningfully with management.

• What “shared prosperity” or benefit sharing looks like in practice—and how companies can ensure that the gains of the green transition are equitably distributed rather than extracted from those least able to absorb the cost.

Who should attend?

Businesses including brands and buyers, civil society organisations

What participants will gain

• Understand how commercial pressures and purchasing practices shape human rights and climate risks across supply chains, drawing on BHRC evidence from Bangladesh, KSA, Cambodia and other relevant contexts

• Identify practical approaches for embedding responsible purchasing practices that enable suppliers to plan, invest and meet climate transition expectations without transferring costs or risks onto workers.

• Examine how social dialogue, freedom of association and worker driven monitoring strengthen resilience, enabling workers to safely raise concerns, co identify risks and contribute to fair and feasible transition plans.

• Explore models of shared prosperity and benefit sharing that ensure workers meaningfully participate in, and equitably gain from, climate transition efforts—moving beyond compliance to worker centred resilience.

Additional resources

• “Commercial Priorities, Human Costs,”; https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/from-us/briefings/us-tariffs/commercial-priorities-human-costs-brand-purchasing-practices-during-the-us-tariff-crisis/

• “Who Pays for Fashion’s Green Transition,”; https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/the-cost-of-transition-bangladeshs-suppliers-and-workers-in-fashions-green-rush/

• “The Missing Thread,”; https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/from-us/briefings/the-missing-thread-workers-absent-from-fashion-companies-climate-plans/

• “We were Treated as if we were Machines"; https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/from-us/briefings/we-were-treated-as-if-we-were-machines-migrant-workers-powering-saudi-arabias-energy-transition/