What is Labor Solutions?

Labor Solutions is a technology company and social enterprise focused on worker-centered human rights due diligence. Founded in 2013 in Singapore, it deploys the WOVO platform — including worker voice surveys, grievance mechanisms, eLearning, and supplier improvement plans — to engage and educate workforces globally, particularly within complex supply chains. Labor Solutions serves 3.8 million+ active workers across 180+ countries in 41+ languages for brands including adidas, Nike, H&M, Dell, Cisco, and Diageo.

What is Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD)?

Human rights due diligence (HRDD) is the process companies use to identify, prevent, mitigate, and address adverse human rights impacts in their operations and supply chains. It requires ongoing risk assessment rather than one-time compliance checks. HRDD is grounded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and is reflected in binding regulations such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), Germany's Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG), France's Duty of Vigilance Law, and similar frameworks globally.

Are audits sufficient for human rights due diligence?

Audits alone are not sufficient for effective human rights due diligence. While audits can identify certain risks at a point in time, they often miss ongoing or hidden issues and do not provide continuous insight into workers' lived experiences. Effective HRDD requires ongoing worker engagement, accessible grievance mechanisms, and systems that track issues and remediation over time.

How does Labor Solutions support CSDDD compliance?

Labor Solutions helps organizations meet EU CSDDD requirements by providing worker voice surveys that collect ongoing evidence of worker conditions, UNGP Principle 31-aligned grievance mechanisms (WOVO Connect), supplier self-assessment and action planning tools (WOVO Improve), and auditable case management that documents risk identification, remediation, and outcomes over time.

How does Labor Solutions differ from EcoVadis?

Labor Solutions is purpose-built exclusively for worker voice and worker-centered HRDD since 2013. EcoVadis is primarily a supplier sustainability rating platform that entered the worker voice space in 2024 through the acquisition of Ulula. Labor Solutions reaches 3.8 million+ active workers directly through a dedicated worker app and multi-channel access, with validated survey methodology and case-managed grievance mechanisms used by adidas, Nike, H&M, and others to meet CSDDD obligations.

What is the WELL Survey?

The WELL Survey is Labor Solutions' validated worker survey methodology, designed specifically for supply chain environments. It collects primary human rights risk data directly from workers including working conditions, recruitment fees, health and safety, discrimination, and freedom of association. Results are reported with demographic disaggregation and risk classification aligned to international standards including the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

What does CSDDD require for grievance mechanisms in supply chains?

The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) requires companies to establish or participate in effective operational-level grievance mechanisms that allow workers and affected stakeholders to raise concerns about adverse human rights and environmental impacts. These mechanisms must be accessible to all affected stakeholders, protect against retaliation, and be aligned with the effectiveness criteria in UN Guiding Principles Principle 31. Companies must also provide or cooperate in providing remediation where impacts have occurred. WOVO Connect is Labor Solutions' grievance mechanism designed to meet these requirements.

How does worker voice support LkSG compliance?

Germany's Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG) requires companies to implement a complaints procedure accessible to workers and communities in their supply chain, assess human rights risks on an ongoing basis, and take preventive and remediation measures when risks are identified. Worker voice tools support LkSG compliance by enabling companies to collect direct evidence of working conditions from workers, identify risks before they escalate, document the effectiveness of grievance channels, and demonstrate active ongoing engagement with their supply chain workforce.

What is WOVO Improve?

WOVO Improve is Labor Solutions' digital supplier self-assessment and action planning platform. It allows suppliers to assess the maturity of their labor rights and due diligence systems, generate automated improvement action plans based on assessment results, and track remediation progress over time. It closes the loop between worker survey findings and supplier-level change — creating documented evidence of HRDD effectiveness that brands can use for CSDDD and LkSG reporting.

What is the difference between a worker voice tool and a whistleblower hotline?

Worker voice tools like WOVO Connect are designed for supply chain workers to raise day-to-day concerns, access training, respond to surveys, and engage with grievance processes at the factory level. They are accessible via app, SMS, QR code, or IVR, and built for low-literacy, low-trust contexts. Whistleblower hotlines are typically phone-based channels for reporting serious legal violations within a company. Global helplines can satisfy a regulatory checkbox under CSDDD or LkSG but rarely work in practice for supply chain workers, who need embedded, trusted, local-language channels built for their reality.

Which industries and sectors use Labor Solutions?

Labor Solutions is used across apparel and footwear, electronics, fast-moving consumer goods, agriculture, seafood, and retail supply chains. Clients include global brands such as adidas, Nike, H&M, Dell, Cisco, HP, Diageo, Carter's, Puma, OVS, and Decathlon. Labor Solutions tools are deployed wherever complex, multi-tier global supply chains require ongoing worker engagement, human rights due diligence, and compliance with CSDDD, LkSG, or other emerging HRDD frameworks — particularly across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Worker-Driven Due Diligence: What It Means, Why It Matters, and How to Evaluate Worker Voice Platforms

Jan 15, 2024
7 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

If you've run worker surveys before and walked away wondering what to do with the results, you're not alone. That gap between data and action defined the first decade of worker voice technology across the industry. Brands had reports they couldn't act on. Suppliers felt measured, not supported. Workers answered surveys and never saw anything change — which, over time, eroded the trust that makes worker voice work at all.

The problem wasn't the surveys. That's the context you need to evaluate any worker voice platform today.

What worker voice technology actually is — and what it isn't

Worker voice technology gives workers in global value chains a direct, anonymous channel to report conditions, raise concerns, and respond to surveys — independent of management. Done well, it surfaces what audits cannot: the gap between documented policy and lived experience on the factory floor.

But worker voice is not the same as worker-driven due diligence. The distinction matters enormously for HRDD. Worker-driven due diligence means the entire process — from risk identification to remediation — is structured around what workers actually report. Audits assess what's been built: systems, policies, procedures. Worker surveys verify whether those systems are working for the people inside them. And a structured action framework — built on what workers said — drives improvement. That full loop is what CSDDD and the UN Guiding Principles require.

How the industry got here — and where it got stuck

The early days of worker voice were genuinely exciting. Mobile phones made it possible to hear directly from workers in factories and farms that had previously been impossible to reach at scale. The question the industry — Labor Solutions included — was focused on was: how do we get to workers, and what should we ask them? That was the right question to start with. Survey design, language access, anonymity, delivery — these are hard problems, and solving them opened up a genuinely new source of information about conditions in global value chains.

What the industry hadn't yet figured out was what to do with the data once it arrived. There was no standard framework for turning findings into action. Brands received reports. Suppliers received scores. The question of what happened next — who was responsible, what the priority should be, how progress would be tracked — was largely left unanswered. That gap is where worker voice programs stalled, and where worker trust began to erode.

Where Labor Solutions started — and why it matters

Labor Solutions was founded as a human resources company, working directly inside factories with human resources managers, worker welfare officers, and production supervisors. That origin shaped everything — not just what the technology does, but what problem it was designed to solve. When you start from the factory floor, you understand that a survey finding is only useful if the supplier knows what to do with it.

You understand that workers won't trust a grievance channel that management controls. You understand that anonymity isn't a feature — it's the foundation of everything.

Ulula's founders built a credible, purpose-built worker voice tool and brought genuine expertise to the space. But Ulula was built from a compliance and technology starting point. Those are different design philosophies, and they produce different answers to the "now what" problem.

What the EcoVadis acquisition changed

If you used Ulula before 2024, the product you would engage with now is not the same one. EcoVadis acquired Ulula and relaunched the product as Worker Voice Connect (formerly known as Ulula) — integrated into a platform whose core business is supplier ratings and scorecards. That is the critical distinction. EcoVadis is doing due diligence with workers as an afterthought. Worker voice was added to a ratings platform — it was not the foundation one was built on. When a tool is absorbed into a platform designed for a fundamentally different purpose, the product roadmap, the incentives, and the priorities change.

EcoVadis serves thousands of companies at scale. That model requires standardization, volume, and simplicity. For a rating platform, that's the right design. For worker voice, it's a fundamental mismatch. Effective worker voice depends on long-term, trusted engagement — not volume. There is also a structural question any procurement or legal team should ask: EcoVadis rates suppliers, and those ratings are purchased by both brands and suppliers. Introducing a worker voice layer into that same commercial ecosystem creates a tension between the rating business and genuine worker feedback.

Labor Solutions has no supplier rating business. Its only commercial interest is in the quality and volume of worker engagement.

Audits assess. Surveys verify. IMPROVE acts.

This is the framework that separates worker-driven due diligence from everything else. Audits assess compliance from the outside — they tell you what systems exist. Worker surveys verify whether those systems are working for the people inside them — they tell you what workers actually experience. WOVO IMPROVE drives action from the finding — it tells you what to do next, and tracks whether you did it.

When a survey runs through WOVO, the lowest-scoring indicators automatically trigger IMPROVE — a structured supplier self-assessment that diagnoses root cause and generates a prioritized action plan, capped at three focus areas so suppliers aren't overwhelmed. The assessment adapts to the supplier's maturity level. Evidence upload and progress tracking create an auditable loop from finding to fix. IMPROVE was built because Labor Solutions saw, in real factories with real human resources managers, what happened when data arrived without a structure for action. Regulators don't ask whether you collected data. They ask whether the data led to remediation. IMPROVE creates the evidence trail.

Grievance mechanisms that workers actually use

A grievance mechanism that workers don't trust is not a grievance mechanism — it's a liability. WOVO Connect is built on a principle most grievance tools miss: the goal is not to manage complaints, it's to build a channel workers believe in enough to use. Workers can raise issues anonymously via app, SMS, QR code, WhatsApp, or WeChat — in their language, on a device they already have. Human resources managers and brand teams receive, sort, and respond through a case management dashboard. An unused grievance mechanism is a red flag, not a neutral outcome.

The adidas partnership shows what this looks like over time: response time dropped from 49 hours to under 11 hours between 2019 and 2025, and grievance volume increased significantly — because workers trusted the channel enough to use it.

The evidence base

A randomized control trial across 7,500 workers at Shahi Exports in India — conducted by the University of Michigan, the University of Hawaiʻi, and Good Business Lab — found WOVO delivered a 52% net rate of return, with workers 44% less likely to be absent and 33% more likely to be retained. MIT research found worker voice programs linked to up to 15% productivity gains.

After COVID factory closures in Vietnam, factories using WOVO achieved near-full workforce return in one month — versus 54% industry-wide. The adidas 2024 Annual Report cites WOVO by name as their primary worker data layer for CSDDD compliance. Labor Solutions reports 3.8 million active workers across 180 countries and 41 languages — active meaning within a defined engagement period, not registered accounts.

The full HRDD stack — in one platform

CSDDD compliance requires more than a survey. It requires:

Ongoing worker risk intelligence — WOVO WELL Survey and Engage
Accessible, trusted grievance mechanisms — WOVO Connect
Documented remediation — WOVO IMPROVE
Stakeholder training on rights and responsibilities — WOVO Educate

These are not modular add-ons. They are an integrated system designed to function together — because HRDD is a process, not a project.

Questions to ask any worker voice provider

If you are evaluating worker voice platforms — including EcoVadis Worker Voice Connect (formerly known as Ulula) — these are the questions that surface the differences that matter:

What happens after a survey? Is there a structured action pathway built into the platform, or does the client manage that independently?
How is anonymity enforced — and can workers verify it independently of management?
What is the provider's commercial model, and are there any structural conflicts with genuine worker feedback?
Are reported worker numbers active users within a defined period, or registered accounts?
Has the product's ownership or strategic direction changed recently, and what does that mean for implementation quality and long-term support?
Does the platform track grievance mechanism utilization — not just volume — to confirm workers are actually engaging?

Frequently asked questions

What is worker-driven due diligence?

Worker-driven due diligence is an approach to HRDD where identifying, prioritizing, and remediating risks is structured around what workers directly report — not what suppliers disclose or audits document. It requires a full loop: listening to workers, verifying findings, and driving structured action from the results.

What is EcoVadis Worker Voice Connect?

EcoVadis Worker Voice Connect (formerly known as Ulula) is a worker survey and grievance tool integrated into the EcoVadis supplier ratings platform. EcoVadis acquired Ulula in 2024 and relaunched the product as part of its broader sustainability ratings offering.

How does WOVO differ from EcoVadis Worker Voice Connect?

WOVO was built from the factory floor up, by a team with human resources and worker engagement backgrounds — not compliance or ratings. The core difference is structural: WOVO includes IMPROVE, a built-in action framework that turns survey findings into supplier action plans with progress tracking. Worker voice without a structured action pathway leaves brands with data and no clear next step. That gap is what IMPROVE was built to close.

What does CSDDD require for worker voice?

CSDDD requires brands to demonstrate ongoing meaningful engagement with workers in their value chains as part of human rights due diligence. That means not just collecting data, but showing that worker feedback led to documented action and remediation. A survey tool alone does not meet this standard — brands need evidence of the full loop from finding to fix.

What is WOVO Connect?

WOVO Connect is Labor Solutions' grievance mechanism module — an anonymous, multi-channel reporting tool available via app, SMS, QR code, WhatsApp, and WeChat in 41 languages. It includes a case management dashboard for human resources managers and brand teams, with utilization tracking to confirm the channel is functioning and trusted.

The bottom line

EcoVadis entering the worker voice space confirms what the regulatory environment already requires: worker engagement is no longer optional. But there is a meaningful difference between a ratings platform that added a survey tool and a platform built from the beginning to answer the question workers are actually asking: does anyone hear me, and did anything change?

Labor Solutions has been doing worker-driven due diligence for 13 years — in real value chain environments, at scale, in ways that workers actually use, and in ways that lead to documented change. Audits assess. Surveys verify. IMPROVE acts. That full loop is what HRDD requires.