“40.3 Million people worldwide are in slavery”: With this sentence, Dr Alexander Trautrims began the opening lecture of the newly launched Campus Colloquium. Dr Alexander Trautrims is an Associate Professor in Operations and Supply Chain Management and leads the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab Business & Economies programme.
Dr Trautrims introduced the topic of modern slavery, the challenge of eradicating it from contemporary supply chains, and provide an understanding where modern slavery risks are heightened. Recent legislative initiatives, such as the German supply chain due diligence law, US trade bans, and UK Modern Slavery Act, and their impact on supply chain management were also be discussed.
Dr Alexander Trautrims published on modern slavery in supply chains in various academic journals, and has undertaken several substantial research, knowledge exchange, and intervention projects on modern slavery and labour exploitation funded for example by the British Academy, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Economic and Social Research Council, US State Department, and Public Works Canada.
He chairs the British Standards Committee on Organisational Responses to Modern Slavery (BS25700), served as a Senior Adviser on supply chains to the OSCE’s Special Representative for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings, as a technical expert on the Council of Europe’s Drafting Committee on Trafficking for the Purpose of Labour Exploitation, as a member on the UN Procurement Human Trafficking and Forced Labour Task Force, and is working closely with businesses, policymakers and NGOs towards eradicating modern slavery from supply chains.