Reshaping Labor Intermediation: An Integrated Workforce Management Strategy to Contrast Agricultural Workers' Exploitation in Italy

Labor exploitation within agri-food supply chains poses significant ethical and managerial challenges, particularly in Mediterranean contexts where irregular employment practices persist. This study investigates the case of NoCap, a third-party ethical certification initiative operating in Italy that integrates social responsibility into agricultural labor governance. By addressing structural dysfunctions such as informal labor markets, precarious working conditions, and power asymmetries along the supply chain, NoCap offers a multidimensional workforce management model and reward model. The study explores how this social innovation can serve as a viable alternative to illegal labor intermediation, promoting ethical value creation and employee well-being. Adopting a qualitative single-case study design, data were collected through 22 semi-structured interviews with workers, farmers, retailers, NGOs, and experts. Data were analyzed using the Gioia methodology, allowing for an inductively grounded theorization of the organizational model. Findings highlight that NoCap's certification model contributes to improving transparency, fair wages, and non-monetary benefits such as labor conditions, while simultaneously enabling downstream actors to leverage ethical value as a reputational asset. Retailers and farmers reported positive perceptions of the initiative's potential to differentiate products and strengthen consumer trust, although limitations remain regarding economic scalability, logistical capacity, and marginal profitability. These results underline the strategic relevance of ethical labor governance and socially motivated reward mixes as a competitive positioning mechanism in socially sensitive markets. The study advances theoretical understandings of public-private governance models, non-monetary employee rewards, and public-private complementarities in business ethics. It offers managerial insights into how socially driven certifications may serve as instruments of both risk mitigation and value generation in agri-food systems.