Four overlapping regulatory frameworks are making ethical labour risk a market access and legal compliance question — in addition to, not instead of, a reputational one. SME importers have an approximately 18-month window, from a June 2026 planning perspective, to build proportionate controls before the EU Forced Labour Regulation applies on 14 December 2027. In our previous edition,, we examined how the social licence to operate — the informal community-level authority that

In my previous article on customer data privacy and cyber risk in e-commerce, I examined how invisible digital vulnerabilities translate into board-level financial exposure for retail operators. Social licence to operate (SLO) represents the physical-world equivalent: a licence held not by any regulator but by the communities in which your business operates — and one that can be revoked without notice, without an appeals process, and with direct revenue consequences that stan