Business and work environments are undergoing rapid transformation, driven by climate impacts, automation and digitalization, ageing workforces, and growing geopolitical tensions. On this year’s Social Justice Day, we reflect on how these overlapping shifts are reshaping risks and expectations for businesses and workers across global supply chains, and how a Just Transition approach can help manage these changes in ways that strengthen business resilience, protect workers and livelihoods, and support more equitable outcomes.
Continue reading to understand how SAI programming supports a just transition; from the SA8000:2026 Standard to SAI’s custom programming, we help businesses and workers navigate moments of heightened disruption and transition.
What Is a Just Transition—and Why Does It Matter?
At its core, a just transition aims to manage these changes in a fair, inclusive, and equitable way—aligning climate and technological transitions with business resilience, decent work, and worker and livelihood protection. It ensures that businesses can adapt to climate change and industry shifts without suffering irreversible losses in productivity or being pushed into involuntary shutdown. This includes supporting businesses in declining sectors and planning for climate-sensitive health and safety risks, workforce transitions, skills shifts, and resilience.
Climate risks and economic restructuring disproportionately affect those with the least capacity to adapt. Informal workers, Indigenous and tribal peoples, women, youth, and migrant workers often bear the heaviest burden of climate shocks and industry transformation. A just transition ensures that workers and communities are protected from losing income, assets, and livelihoods or facing forced migration. It does so through methods such as reskilling, upskilling, active labor market policies, and adequate social protection. Equally important is ensuring that new sectoral jobs and emerging technology applications meet the standards of decent work.
The key objectives of a just transition are:
- Economic access and climate resilience for all: Inclusive economies that protect businesses and livelihoods and support equitable development.
- Decent work: Aligning climate change adaptation and mitigation action with employment, social protection, and labor rights to create more and better jobs and foster sustainable businesses of all sizes.
- Inclusive decision-making: Ensuring workers, employers, communities, and marginalized groups have a meaningful voice in shaping transition policies and actions.
“Sustainable development is only possible with the active engagement of the world of work. Governments, employers and workers are not passive bystanders, but rather agents of change, who are able to develop new ways of working that safeguard the environment for present and future generations, eradicate poverty and promote social justice by fostering sustainable enterprises and creating decent work for all.” (ILO, 2015)
How SA8000:2026 Supports a Just Transition
The SA8000 Standard for Decent Work is a leading international social standard, applicable globally and across all industries. SA8000:2026 (published on January 1, 2026) offers a robust management system framework that helps businesses build resilience while strengthening worker protections – both essential anchors for a just transition.
Designed for continuous improvement across labor topics, SA8000:2026 enables businesses to identify risks, engage workers, and adapt management practices and labor performance over time. These capabilities are critical as businesses face accelerating global trends, including climate impacts, automation and digitalization, ageing workforces, and geopolitical tensions, which are creating rapid and uneven impacts on operations, supply chains, jobs, and livelihoods.
Aligned with a just transition approach, SA8000:2026 offers a context-aware framework to support businesses in planning workforce transitions, skills shifts, and business resilience while respecting the rights of workers and ensuring decent work. It enables businesses to plan smoother, more proactive transitions from current business and supply chain environments toward the future of work through adaptive and coordinated responses.
More specifically, SA8000:2026 enables a just transition in practice through:
- Whole-business approach: Embedding labor and HRDD principles across all areas of operation and considering impacts on workers and stakeholders in decision-making. This promotes internal alignment and consistency during periods of transition, such as automation and production relocation.
- Risk-based due diligence approach: Recognizing a broad scope of risks across supply chains, including impacts on a wider range of workers, not only those directly employed but also those affected indirectly or linked to the business. This acknowledges the systemic nature of many transition-related risks, which cannot be addressed by individual businesses alone, and supports collective and collaborative responses.
- Stakeholder engagement: Actively engaging workers and stakeholders that may be adversely impacted, including the most vulnerable, and creating channels to identify and address transition-related risks early, such as climate shocks, job displacement, or technology impacts.
- Decent work criteria: SA8000:2026 includes provisions that directly support workers during periods of transition, including:
- Protection related to termination and business disruption caused by climate change or systemic industry transformation.
- Health and safety/OSH management responsive to changing systemic risks.
- Safeguards for alternative employment arrangements, such as platform or remote work and redeployment within the same business.
- Strengthened protections for migrant workers responsive to changing systemic risks.
- Living wage and living income requirements that reflect inflation and the true cost of living.
- Privacy protections, cybersecurity, and data management policies addressing new risks introduced by digitalization and emerging technologies, including digitalized grievance mechanisms and secure handling of remote work data.
How SAI Can Support Businesses Towards a Just Transition
While the concept of just transition is gaining prominence globally, the underlying work is not new to SAI. For many years, we have supported businesses and stakeholders in managing operational risk, adapting to policy and market shifts, and strengthening resilience.
Across global supply chains, SAI supports businesses and workers navigating urgent trends in the world of work through our long-term expertise and experience:
- Management systems: SA8000, Social Fingerprint, and risk-based due diligence that embed worker voice, strengthen resilience, and enable structured transition planning.
- Decent work systems: Climate-responsive health and safety, safe introduction of new technologies, and strengthened worker voice and grievance pathways.
- Skills development: Support for businesses to reassess skills strategies for workers and management across changing work environments.
- Landscape-level approaches: Multi-stakeholder models that build sectoral and regional resilience, especially in contexts experiencing business shutdowns, job losses, or worker displacement driven by climate shocks, automation, or broader industry transitions.
- Worker Voice: Facilitate dialogue between management and workers from every level and job function in decision-making and problem-solving processes to identify and address workers’ concerns and needs in operation transformation.
Notably, this support must extend across supply chains, recognizing that lower-tier businesses and workers often face the highest risks, both in working conditions and climate-risks exposure.
Moving Forward Together
The global shift toward climate-resilient and digital economies is accelerating. Supporting businesses through the transition is critical not only for business continuity, but also for the workers and communities they impact. Workers are the backbone of resilient societies, and a just transition is essential to prevent widening inequalities, job losses, and occupational hazards and to help shape transitions that protect workers and livelihoods, strengthen businesses, and uphold decent work standards.
