Hi Will,
Thanks for raising these points in this particular forum. As you know, there is an important number of actors in the responsible investment space that are trying to effect change in this area, whether it be asset owners and managers engaging with companies over forced labour risk or sustainability rating agencies providing analysis on such issues.

To accelerate the acceptance by companies that this constitutes an important issue for investors, there would be a benefit to having forced labour raised on a continuous and ongoing basis during analyst conference calls. If this was done, the problem would make its way to the agenda of board meetings and those of executive managers.

In parallel, investors need to provide incentives for companies to do the right thing. For instance, long-term investors like pension funds generally accept that a company invest time and resources into a supply chain mapping exercise - they will remain shareholders over years. However, there is still a large part of the financial community that has a short term outlook and that see investments into supply chain transparency/due diligence as wasteful spending.

As you outlined, it's a complex issue for which there is not one easy solution but there are a number of investor and multi stakeholder initiatives touching on forced labour. More buy in from "mainstream finance" practitioners would definitely increase the momentum.