Hunton Retail Law Resource

Although supply chain labor has long been a primary focus for unions, the COVID pandemic changed how labor viewed supply chain leverage, especially in retail. Years of planning during COVID produced new approaches to creating co-employer liability for lead firms—companies that sit at the top of supply chains, franchise systems, subcontracting networks, and other business arrangements in which work integral to their business is performed by workers whose legal employer is another entity.  Initial steps are now maturing into a comprehensive approach aimed at the commercial heart of the retail model. By 2027, retail's central labor challenge will be a sophisticated, top-down strategy to force lead firms into binding agreements.

Historically, unions viewed leverage as attacking the employer’s own vulnerabilities—its wage-hour practices, health benefits, working conditions. Unions now view the supply chain itself as the vulnerability. As they frame it, the prices, volumes, and deadlines the lead firm imposes on their suppliers leaves those suppliers with no room to pay more, staff up, or slow down, so the supplier’s treatment of workers is attributed to the lead firm that dictated those terms. The approach makes the lead firm answerable for conditions it does not directly control, and that gap is precisely what makes the leverage work.

The December 2026 Conference Agenda from the UNI Commerce Division of UNI Global Union, the world’s largest global labor federation, illustrates the shift.  The conference’s four key themes included “Growing Union Power in Value Chains” and “Growing Union Power in Value Chain,” which were direct references to the new approach.  And the global federations have built the infrastructure necessary for a sustained, coordinated effort.  UNI and IndustriALL, another large global union federation, launched a Human Rights Due Diligence Competence Centre, and UNI followed with a Due Diligence Toolkit, both built to drive worker demands into a lead firm’s oversight of its suppliers. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CS3D) adds legal and financial risk, turning aspirational commitments into legally enforceable ones.  That risk enhances unions ability to leverage a lead firm's own codes of conduct and due diligence commitments.

A key to this plan is replacing employer and third-party due diligence with worker-driven social auditing. Unions argue company-controlled auditing is subject to manipulation and also leaves the lead firm's own purchasing practices beyond reach. The plan to dismantle the current due diligence regime finds some support in CS3D, which speaks to verifiers having “complete independence from the company,” be “free from any conflicts of interest,” and free from “external influence, whether direct or indirect.”

As the UNI conference material illustrates, the near term strategy will focus on two areas: Artificial Intelligence and Health and Safety. AI captures the zeitgeist, the fear of displacement and of skilled work reduced to menial tasks. That fear makes it a potent subject for a leverage campaign because it reaches past the workforce to customers, investors, and regulators who share it, giving a union an audience primed to see the lead firm as the driving force in workplace disruptions.  Threatened AI dislocations also fit the unions' “just transition” framing perfectly, converting a technology rollout into a moral question, and making every operational decision a potential subject of stakeholder engagement. Framed this way, AI shifts the argument from working terms to operational ones, giving unions leverage over how the lead firm runs its business, not merely how it treats the people inside it.

Health and safety appears tactical but works strategically because simply asking the question “how safe” positions the lead firm as putting profits over people. The garment campaign runs this play openly. The June 2026 report Mitigating Heat Stress in the Garment, Footwear, and Travel Goods Sector, for example, sets out what firms already have in place and then argues it falls short of the danger workers face. Heat is only one front. Third-party violence, harassment, burnout, working while sick, a staffing cut, a delivery window, or a speed target each trace up the chain. Retail's promises of speed and convenience—rapid replenishment, high-velocity fulfillment—translate directly into physical hazard at every link, putting the lead firm that set those terms on the hook for the harm they produce.

The ultimate objective is binding agreements with lead firms—a global framework agreement, the International Accord, or both. Each is offered to the lead firm as a lifeline, the way to mitigate the very supply chain risk the campaign built against it.  Recognizing the playbook can assist lead firms in evaluating the value of that proposition.