Drawing on a study of a Scottish government initiative to ensure the provision of a living wage to social care workers, the article sheds new light on the value of regulating domestic supply chains to enhance labour standards in supplier organisations, and the factors that facilitate and hinder such regulation. The study confirms that supply chains driven by monopsonistic purchasers tend to drive down employment conditions, while indicating that the studied initiative met with a good deal of success due to a combination of the government generated ‘soft’ regulation and support from care providers that reflected both value and pragmatic considerations. It also highlights the contradictory tensions that can arise between policy aspirations and business objectives and suggests that to be effective, initiatives to enhance labour standards in supply chains need to address adverse market dynamics.

通过对苏格兰政府一项旨在确保向社会护理工作者提供生活工资的倡议的研究，该文章为规范国内供应链以提高供应商组织的劳工标准的价值提供了新的亮点，并提出了促进和阻碍因素这样的规定。该研究证实，由单调购买者驱动的供应链往往会压低就业条件，同时表明，由于政府产生了“软”规章和护理提供者的支持相结合，所研究的举措取得了很大的成功。价值和务实的考虑。它还强调了政策抱负与业务目标之间可能会产生矛盾的张力，并建议要有效，