Social@risk™

Workers at the bottom of the global supply chain are exposed to endemic rights violations every day. They write about their grievances and fight for their rights in social media. Social@risk™ searches and analyses millions of workers’ posts in order to amplify their message.

We need better tools to make global production fair

Social@risk™ offers a novel approach that lifts the veil of secrecy surrounding factory sites without relying on physical access or off-site probing. It is a unique, participatory platform for uncovering rights violations, organising remedy, and managing social risks. Our tool collects millions of grievances from social media and transforms them into systematic, quantifiable labour rights assessments of factory sites, suppliers, sectors, and regions.

Social@risk™ is a tool for organisations that want to stop unlawful and unfair practices in global supply chains and acknowledge that current means to protect workers are not good enough. Social@risk™ is particularly effective in countries where workers and independent factory auditors are at risk when they speak up. Through a network of partners, we make a difference.

Labour activism with expert-centred machine learning

Almost all relevant data from workers is unstructured and hidden behind large chunks of irrelevant information. Big-data driven labour activism, therefore, requires concepts and technologies that can find, structure, interpret, and measure the relevance of information. Advances in algorithms and complexity theory as well as computational modelling open new opportunities. To make these technologies amenable for labour activism they need to be well-orchestrated with human acts of data-sense-making and ethical integrity. We, therefore, designed Social@risk™ as an open platform that puts independent experts in charge of informing and evaluating our algorithms.