Socio-ecological value chain resilience and cleaning workers

 

Examining the ways that industries survived the COVID-19 pandemic can teach us a great deal about the resilience of supply chains, the ways supply chain dynamics shape worker resilience, and the measures states can adopt to support both.

While all supply chains depend on human labour, workers are frequently ignored in conceptualisations of supply chain logistics and resilience. Yet, COVID-19 demonstrated that supply chains fail when workers fall sick.

The article "Socio-ecological value chain resilience and cleaning workers" by Sara Todd, Carla Chan Unger, Ema Moolchand and Shelley Marshall has generated a new, worker-focused model of socio-ecological resilience that views value chain actors as interdependent.