A Method to Assess Social Sustainability of Multi-Tier Supply Chains in the Textile Industry

The EU corporate sustainability due diligence directive mandates human rights due diligence for organizations within their global supply chains. Social sustainability is highly critical in textile supply chains due to widespread poor working conditions. This work assesses the social sustainability of multi-tier textile supply chains, recursively allocating the performance from lower-tiers to higher-tiers suppliers following a risk-based approach. The method exploits a MCDM model for Sustainable Supplier Selection and Evaluation, which introduces a multi-tier aggregation methodology, combining non-compensatory and compensatory techniques. A case study illustrates the effectiveness of the method in ranking suppliers based on their upstream supply chain social performance and in supporting decisions for sustainability managers. The work contributes to the sustainable supply chain management literature by developing a method to quantitatively assess social sustainability in multi-tier supply chains, expanding the social sustainability performance assessment beyond tier-1 suppliers while considering the sustainability risk strategies of focal companies.