The payment rail
The work moves one way. The money moves the other.
A tonne of cocoa, a night shift, a container of prawns: whatever moved, the rail records it, and the money record has to agree with it. At every handover the platform can ask what no auditor can ask at scale: does what left match what arrived, and does the money paid match the work that produced it? When the two records disagree, the gap is arithmetic. It is visible the day it happens, and it names the leg it happened on.
Try it
Settle a job, then break something.
Two chains that look nothing alike, running the same four checks. Pick one, press settle to run it end to end, then inject a fault and watch which leg the rail names. Figures are illustrative and every company shown is fictional.
Awaiting settlement
The reconciliation
The four things the rail checks.
Each one is an arithmetic comparison between two records written by different parties, at different times, for different reasons, and neither of them written with the other in mind. What changes between one chain and the next is the unit, not the check.
Check 01
Volume
What leaves a node cannot exceed what came in, allowing for declared loss and conversion. Every unit carries a record naming where it came from, a plot of land or a worker on a roster, and travels with it.
Catches: stock from an unregistered origin, and hours billed that nobody worked. Both are how the untraceable gets laundered into a clean stream.
Check 02
Value
What the producer or worker received as a share of what the buyer paid on the same job. Both numbers are on the ledger, so the share is computed per transaction, not estimated per season.
Catches: a premium invoiced but never delivered, and margin stacked through sub-contract layers until the award wage no longer fits.
Check 03
Labour
Wages settled against a job, held against the labour it required, at a rate the relevant wage award, the union or the cooperative publishes.
Catches: work that arrives with no wages to explain it, which is the strongest forced-labour signal in the system.
Check 04
Timing
Settlement dates are on the ledger, so the lag between delivery and payment, and between work and wages, is measured.
Catches: withheld and deferred wages, a recognised forced-labour indicator in its own right. Late payment is reported as a finding.
| Check | In a goods chain | In a labour chain |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | Kilograms out of a node against kilograms in, each carrying a lot passport naming the plot. | Hours billed up the chain against hours with a named, registered worker behind them. |
| Value | Farm gate payment as a share of the gross price on the same lot. | Wages as a share of the charge rate the client paid for the same shift, and against the award. |
| Labour | Wages settled against the person-days the volume required at a published day rate. | Wage settlements against the hours rostered. Every hour should reach a worker wallet. |
| Timing | Days between delivery and settlement, and between harvest and wages. | Days between the shift and the wage, measured against the invoices settled above it. |
Which chains
Anywhere the money and the work are recorded apart.
Cocoa is the founding chain, chosen because it is one of the hardest: informal tiers, a smallholder origin and a chain that crosses four jurisdictions before it reaches a shelf. The rail is built for the gap between what a chain says and what it pays, and that gap is everywhere.
Commodities
A physical unit moves and can be counted. Seafood, fruit, cocoa and cotton all share the same failure: product from an origin nobody can name is mixed into a certified stream at a trading leg, and the paperwork follows the product rather than the truth.
Labour supply
Nothing physical moves, so the unit is the hour. That makes the labour check more direct: there is no person-days norm to estimate, because the hours are the product. A chain of sub-contractors is exactly where wages go missing, and it is exactly what the rail is counting.
Both at once
Most real chains are both. A fruit grower buys picking labour through a contractor; a processor buys cleaning through a facilities firm. The rail runs both on the same ledger, with a different unit in the top band.
What a flag costs
The levy, priced by conduct.
Chain value ledgered on the single job above is $290,000. At the mixed tiers shown, the levy comes to $441 across the four levied legs. The farm gate settlement inside the cooperative is not levied.
| Index tier | Rate | Whole chain at this tier |
|---|---|---|
| Leading | 0.10% | |
| Advanced | 0.15% | |
| Mainstream | 0.20% | |
| Lagging | 0.30% | |
| Non-disclosing | 0.35% |
An unresolved reconciliation flag holds a company out of the Leading tier, so the gap is priced. Levy collected from Lagging and Non-disclosing companies is routed back to the cooperative at the origin of the chain, so the charge for poor conduct funds the people the chain treats worst.
Prior art
The pieces already work elsewhere.
Each part of this has been proved somewhere, in a different sector.
- Qatar proved the mechanism, on labour. A mandatory electronic Wage Protection System, in force since 2015 and covering roughly 96% of eligible workers, detects labour violations from payment records rather than site visits. No commodity anywhere in it. International Labour Organization
- The Fair Food Program proved the consequence, on produce. Its penny per pound has moved more than US$40m since 2011, as a line item that lands on a worker's payslip. Fair Food Standards Council
- Trado proved the economics. A consortium led by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, with Barclays, BNP Paribas, Rabobank, Standard Chartered, Sainsbury's and Unilever, swapped sustainability data for cheaper pre-shipment finance along a Malawian tea chain. CISL
Where the rail is up to
What each chain still has to settle.
- The rail is built. Working code settles real payments and tracks real units of supply, with payment gateway and banking connectivity in place in some jurisdictions.
- Configuration is per jurisdiction and per chain. Gateways, banking arrangements and approvals differ everywhere, so each new country and each new chain has its own setup to finalise before volume moves.
- The figures on this page are illustrative and every company named is fictional. The cocoa run uses a reference price of roughly US$5,000 per tonne.
- A flag ranks where to look. Reconciliation detects the inconsistency and tells an investigator which leg and which week. The finding still needs people.
- The labour check needs a local norm. The rate, and the person-days or hours it is measured against, must come from an award, a union agreement or a published cooperative norm rather than from the platform, or the check becomes an outsider's opinion dressed as arithmetic.
- Every chain depends on its informal tiers joining. Licensed Buying Companies in Ghana, or the last sub-contractor in a labour chain. Where they are missing the rail sees work with no matching wages, which is itself the flag, and following it up is ground-level work software cannot do.
Getting the informal tiers of a chain onto the ledger is the hard part, and it is settled by negotiation.
Next
From movement to evidence
The rail is one of four records. See how Proof reads all four and turns them into a priced assessment.
Proof and the Index ›Back
The whole idea
How the rail, Counted, Heard, Declared, Proof and the federation fit together, who owns what, and where the project has got to.
Just Supply overview ›