Fair, with Proof.
See where a supply chain's money and its workers disagree.
Just Supply records what a supply chain paid for each tonne or each shift, sets it beside what the workers and the company say, and shows where they disagree. Owned in the end by the people on the chain. Built in Australia.
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 work behind reasonable steps. See Proof
- A funder or a partnerWho is behind Just Supply, and who owns the rail 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 one assessment.
The rail records the money. 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. All five run, and the rail settles payments chain by chain as each country's banking approvals allow.
Counted listens to the many. Heard acts on the one. Declared asks the companies. Proof weighs the evidence.
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 any of it works. Certifiers, scorecards and social audits check a company's claims from the outside, after the fact, on paper. Those checks produce certificates, and 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 step, from the farm gate or the night shift to the retail shelf, and the record is already there when an auditor asks. Then give the rail to the people on it, through cooperatives, with workers and producers holding the most votes. Compliance comes from how the money moves, and ownership sits with the people the chain depends on.
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, per lot in a goods chain or per shift block in a labour chain: 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. Anyone on the site can answer, and pass it on.
See what Counted does
What the one saysHeardAn anonymous channel where a worker can raise a concern without risking tomorrow's shift. Three words let them come back and follow the case through to resolution, without ever being identified.
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 validator, the named person who checks each score, signs it off.
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 already 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 and run from day one, Declared and Proof read your documents, and setup takes weeks: your sites, your languages, your service levels and the channel your team already watches. 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 already have
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, a smallholder origin, four jurisdictions to cross before a shelf. The rail counts a unit of work against the money paid for it, and that arithmetic works whatever the unit is: a kilogram in a commodity chain, an hour in a labour chain, and most real chains are both. We are looking for chains in any of these that want change big enough to show up in the numbers.
- 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
The levy
The better the record, the lower the levy.
Every transaction on the rail pays a small fee, and the company's tier in the Index sets the rate, so good conduct costs less. Any company that meets every criterion reaches Leading, with no cap on how many do. A company with no assessment pays the most, and levy from the bottom two tiers goes back to the cooperative at the origin of the chain.
| Index tier | Indicative rate |
|---|---|
| Leading | 0.10% |
| Advanced | 0.15% |
| Mainstream | 0.20% |
| Lagging | 0.30% |
| Non-disclosing | 0.35% |
The rates shown are indicative. The tier structure is the mechanism, and the percentages are set per supply chain, against its own margins, volumes and cost of capital. What sets each tier
Ownership
The people with the least power today hold the most votes.
A federation of five link cooperatives, one for each tier of a chain, with voting weight following member numbers on a log scale. That puts the largest blocs with workers and producers, and they vote.
A faked record
If a trader fakes a record, the buyer above them pays for it
If a trader fakes a payment record, or a sub-contractor bills hours nobody worked, the buyer above them inherits a claim it cannot support, and that lands on its own Index score. At the origin, where the work is done, worker-controlled data and the workers' voting majority protect the record.
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.