Fair, with Proof.
See where a supply chain's money and its workers disagree.
Just Supply is a payment record for supply chains. It logs what a chain paid for each tonne or each shift at every handover, sets that beside what the workers and the company say, and shows where they disagree.
Built in Australia by three organisations, and owned in the end by the workers and producers on the chain.
Where to start
- Running a supply chain or a workforceStart with the records you already hold. How a first engagement runs
- A public agency or a regulatorProof does the assessment behind a company's reasonable steps, the due diligence it has to show it took. See Proof
- A funder or a partnerWho is behind Just Supply, and who owns it in the end. Who we are
- A worker or a producerFind the poster at your workplace, or raise a concern in private. See Heard
What Just Supply is
Four records and Proof.
The payment rail is the record of the money: every handover along a chain, logged with its volume, value, wages and timing. Counted takes an anonymous census of the workers, and Heard takes their grievances. Declared takes the company's account and checks the evidence behind it. Proof reads all four and gives the company a tier, one of five grades from Leading to Non-disclosing.
- Checks on every rail job
- Four
- For a worker to answer Counted
- Eight minutes
- Forced-labour indicators asked about
- Eleven
- Tiers a company can reach
- Five
The problem
The money stops before it reaches the people doing the work.
The people who grow, catch, pick, build and clean capture a small slice of what a chain is worth, and have no say in how it works. Audits check a company's claims on paper, after the fact. The money and the power stay where they were.
The idea
Record every payment as it happens.
Put a chain's payments on a rail that records them at every handover, from the farm gate or the night shift to the retail shelf. Each stretch between two handovers is a leg, and the record of every leg is there before an auditor asks. Then give the rail to the people on it.
For example: a cooperative delivers a tonne of cocoa and the paperwork shows a fair price paid. The farmers say they were paid less, and late. Both records exist, and nobody has set them side by side. The rail puts them side by side.
The four records and Proof
Each record has its own owner and its own data store.
The four records answer to different people, so none can quietly correct another. Proof reads all four, and where they disagree, that is what it reports first.
What the money didThe payment railVolume, value, wages and timing reconciled at every handover: what moved, and whether the people who did the work were paid for it.
Run a job through it
What the many sayCountedAn anonymous worker census. A QR poster, eight minutes, the eleven International Labour Organization forced-labour indicators, no name and no account.
See what Counted does
What the one saysHeardAn anonymous channel where a worker raises a concern without risking tomorrow's shift, and follows the case to resolution with three words.
See what Heard does
What the company saysDeclaredA company's account of itself, checked against the documents behind it. Each answer carries the quoted passage and its page, and a named person signs off each score.
See what Declared does
Weighing the evidenceProof and the IndexReads the rail, Counted, Heard and Declared together and gives a company a tier, with the evidence attached. Published, the tier is the Index.
How the assessment works
Start here
Start with the records you hold.
Your documents, an anonymous census and a grievance channel produce a risk register for each supplier, a draft annual report and a plan to strengthen your grievance mechanism. That is a complete first engagement.
Counted and Heard go up on the wall as QR posters and run from day one. Declared and Proof read your documents. Setup takes weeks. When the rail reaches your chain it adds the fourth record, and everything from the first engagement carries into it.
Start with the records you hold
Opens an email to hello@justsupply.org
Which chains
Any chain, starting with cocoa.
Cocoa is the first proving ground because it is one of the hardest: informal tiers where traders deal without contracts, a smallholder origin, four jurisdictions before a shelf. The rail counts a unit of work against the money paid for it, a kilogram in a commodity chain or an hour in a labour chain, and most real chains are both.
- Cocoa and chocolate, first
- Seafood and aquaculture
- Fruit and horticulture
- Construction
- Cleaning and facilities
- Meat and food processing
- Textiles and garments
- Logistics and warehousing
Run the same four checks over a cocoa lot and a labour-hire shift block
What the software does and what a person does
- A flag tells you where to look. The rail names the leg and the week the numbers stopped adding up, and a person finds out why.
- Counted reaches whoever is standing at the poster, and whoever they pass it on to. There is no list to be on, so labour-hire crews and day labour answer on the same terms as anyone else, and your team decides where the posters go.
- Proof writes the first draft and you sign it: it reads your documents and produces the report, and you correct it and put your name to it before it goes to anyone.