In the industrial zones of Chonburi, Thailand, seven companies gathered under the guidance of the International Labour Organization to confront a challenge as old as governance itself: the distance between a written policy and a lived practice. The ILO's mentorship programme, embedded within a broader effort to advance responsible supply chains across Asia, sought not merely to inform but to cultivate — turning company representatives into internal stewards of human rights accountability. By bringing management and workers into the same room as partners rather than adversaries, the initiative
ILO mentorship programme builds human rights due diligence capacity in Thai supply chains
Policy doesn't change behaviour by itself. You need people inside.
Mark
Why does the ILO think mentorship works better than just training everyone at once?
Mimi
Because policy doesn't change behaviour by itself. You need people inside the company who understand the policy deeply enough to teach others, to answer questions, to adapt it to real situations. A mentor is someone colleagues trust and can learn from over time.
Mark
But these companies already had audits and processes. What was actually missing?
Mimi
The gap between having a system and having people who can make it work. You can audit hundreds of suppliers, but if your own team doesn't truly understand human rights due diligence—if they can't explain why it matters or how to apply it—the whole thing stays surface-level.
Mark
Why did they insist on having both workers and managers in the room together?
Mimi
Because human rights due diligence isn't something management does to workers. It's something you figure out together. If only managers attend, you get a compliance mindset. If workers are there, you get real dialogue about what actually happens on the floor.
Mark
What happens after the four days end?
Mimi
That's the crucial part. Companies develop their own improvement plans and the ILO stays involved with follow-up support. It's not a certificate and goodbye. It's the beginning of a longer process of actually changing how the company operates.
Mark
Do you think seven companies is enough to shift an entire sector?
Mimi
Not by itself. But these seven become mentors to their own people, who mentor others. It spreads through relationships and trust, not through mandates. And the broader training programme has already reached fifty companies. The mentorship layer is how you deepen that reach.
The Pulse
- Global regulatory pressure is forcing Thailand's automotive and electronics sectors to prove their human rights commitments are real, not performative — and the gap between policy documents and factory-floor reality has never been more exposed.
- More than fifty companies have received HRDD training since June 2026, yet information alone has not been enough to shift how businesses actually operate day to day.
- The mentorship model disrupts conventional compliance culture by seating workers and managers together as co-architects of change, rather than positioning labour as the subject of audits conducted by management.
- Participants like AutoAlliance and Quanta Thailand entered the programme with existing systems and policies already in place — but lacking the internal human capacity to make those frameworks breathe across their supplier networks.
- Seven companies are now tasked with building enterprise-specific improvement plans, with the ILO committed to sustained follow-up — signalling that this is a long-term institutional investment, not a one-time training event.
In the industrial zones of Chonburi, Thailand, seven companies gathered under the guidance of the International Labour Organization to confront a challenge as old as governance itself: the distance between a written policy and a lived practice. The ILO's mentorship programme, embedded within a broader effort to advance responsible supply chains across Asia, sought not merely to inform but to cultivate — turning company representatives into internal stewards of human rights accountability. By bringing management and workers into the same room as partners rather than adversaries, the initiative acknowledged that durable change in global supply chains must be grown from within, person by person, before it can be audited from without.
In July and August 2026, seven companies convened in Chonburi, Thailand, for a four-day ILO mentorship programme designed to do something harder than teach human rights due diligence — to make it stick. The initiative was part of the ILO's Advancing Responsible Supply Chains and Decent Work in Asia project, funded by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which had already delivered HRDD training to more than fifty companies across Thailand's automotive and electronics sectors since June 2026. The mentorship programme was built on the recognition that reaching companies with information and changing how they operate are two very different things.
What set the programme apart was its architecture. Rather than targeting beginners, it sought out people who already had some grounding in social dialogue and due diligence, and equipped them to become internal educators — capable of mentoring colleagues and embedding responsible business conduct into the daily rhythms of their organizations. Crucially, both management and worker representatives attended together, a deliberate bipartite design that treated labour as a partner in problem-solving rather than a subject of compliance.
For participants like Kanlaya Paul of AutoAlliance, the value lay not in discovering new policies but in building the human capacity to make existing ones travel deeper into supplier networks. For Narissara Simmarkum of Quanta Thailand, the challenge was translating a global headquarters policy into something workers and managers at each facility could genuinely understand and apply. Both stories pointed to the same gap: the space between a policy's existence and its practice.
Companies left the workshop with a concrete mandate — to develop enterprise-specific HRDD improvement plans — and a commitment from the ILO for tailored follow-up support. As regulatory expectations around human rights due diligence continue to tighten globally, the programme offered Thailand's supply chain companies something more durable than compliance: the internal capacity to identify and address human rights risks as an ongoing discipline, sustained by people rather than paperwork.
In the industrial heartland of Chonburi, Thailand, seven companies gathered for a four-day workshop in July and August 2026 that would reshape how they approach human rights accountability across their supply chains. The International Labour Organization had designed something more ambitious than a standard training session: a mentorship programme that would turn company representatives into internal champions of responsible business conduct, capable of translating policy into the daily work of their organizations.
The initiative emerged from a larger push by the ILO's Advancing Responsible Supply Chains and Decent Work in Asia project, funded by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Since June 2026, a broader human rights due diligence training programme had already reached more than fifty companies across Thailand's automotive, auto-parts, and electronics sectors. But reaching companies with information was one thing. Getting them to actually change how they operated was another. The mentorship programme was designed to bridge that gap.
Who showed up mattered. The seven participating firms included multinational corporations alongside Thai manufacturers and suppliers of varying sizes. Critically, both management and worker representatives attended together, a deliberate choice that reflected the programme's belief that lasting change requires genuine dialogue between labour and capital, not directives handed down from above. This bipartite approach distinguished the initiative from conventional compliance training, which often treats workers as subjects to be audited rather than partners in problem-solving.
The mentorship model targeted a specific audience: people who already understood the basics of social dialogue and due diligence, either through prior ILO training, other programmes, or their own professional experience. Rather than starting from scratch, the four-day sessions taught these representatives how to become educators themselves—how to facilitate learning among their peers, mentor colleagues, and shepherd the practical application of human rights due diligence within their own enterprises and across their supplier networks. The logic was straightforward: sustainable change spreads through people, not policies.
Kanlaya Paul, the International Supply Chain Manager at AutoAlliance (Thailand), acknowledged that her company already had systems in place—labour audits, social audits covering hundreds of suppliers, various internal processes. But the mentorship programme offered something her existing infrastructure lacked: the capacity to strengthen how her own people could train and mentor one another, extending good practices deeper into the supply chain. It was the difference between having a policy and having people who could make that policy live.
Narissara Simmarkum, a Corporate Social Responsibility Administrator at QMB Co., Ltd., which operates as Quanta Thailand, described a parallel challenge. Her company's headquarters had developed a human rights due diligence policy that cascaded across plants worldwide, including Thailand. The policy existed. The problem was translating it into actual practice—ensuring that workers and managers at each facility understood it, believed in it, and knew how to apply it when real situations arose. The mentorship programme offered a pathway to that translation, a way to build the capability that policies alone could never create.
Participating companies would leave the workshop with more than new knowledge. They were tasked with developing enterprise-specific human rights due diligence improvement plans tailored to their own operations and supply chains. The ILO committed to providing follow-up support, helping firms move from workshop insights to concrete action. This was not a one-off training event but the beginning of a longer engagement, a recognition that institutional change requires sustained attention and external accountability.
The timing of the initiative reflected a broader shift in global business. Companies faced mounting pressure from regulators and markets to demonstrate genuine human rights due diligence, not merely compliance theatre. Thailand's automotive and electronics sectors, deeply integrated into global supply chains, felt this pressure acutely. The ILO's mentorship programme offered a way to meet these expectations while building something more durable: internal capacity to identify, prevent, and address human rights risks as an ongoing practice rather than a periodic audit.
Notable Quotes
This mentorship programme helps us strengthen the capacity of our people to train and mentor colleagues and extend good practices further down the supply chain— Kanlaya Paul, International Supply Chain Manager at AutoAlliance (Thailand) Co., Ltd.
The mentorship programme helps us strengthen our capability to translate that policy into practice, share knowledge with colleagues and support more effective and sustainable application across the enterprise and supply chain— Narissara Simmarkum, Corporate Social Responsibility Administrator at QMB Co., Ltd. (Quanta Thailand)
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