If you want to know about the nutritional value of the food you buy at the grocery store, you can find a nutrition label on the container or somewhere nearby. If you want to know how your potential purchase contributes to a more just and equal world, what do you look for?

That’s the idea behind JUST, the first ever social justice label, a voluntary disclosure program consisting of 22 indicators with a simple one, two, or three star rating for each. The indicators are arranged into six broad areas measuring an organization’s contributions to a more just and equitable society: diversity, equity, safety, worker benefit, local benefit, and stewardship. The idea is, you can see, right in one place, how much social justice is contained within a product or service you’ve purchased.

This is the list of indicators Just uses to determine the social justice of a product:

• Non-discrimination policy

• Ethnic diversity

• Gender diversity

• Full time employment

• Pay scale equity

• Employee/Union friendly

• Living wage

• Gender pay equity

• Family friendly

• Occupational safety

• Hazardous chemicals

• Worker happiness

• Health care

• Continuing education

• Local control

• Local sourcing

• Responsible investing

• Volunteering

• Positive products

• Charitable giving

• Animal welfare

• Transparency

Jason McLennan is CEO of the International Living Future Institute the group that came up with JUST. “There’s still going to be a lot of people that don’t care, just like consumers that don’t care about trans-fats,” McLennan says, but he and his colleagues at ILFI are confident that there will be plenty that care enough to know and enough to make decisions based on that knowledge.

There’s already been more early interest from businesses to participate in Just than ILFI can currently handle. “The early adopters so far have been those that are already doing good things. They’re already leaders, and they’re looking for a way to differentiate from their competitors,” McLennan says.

To date, one bank, two engineering firms, a small environmental nonprofit and ILFI itself have all gone through the Just labeling process. So it’s not just designed for businesses. “If you have employees, you can participate in JUST,” McLennan says. Three more organizations were going through the Just labeling process at the time of writing this post.

JUST’s flexibility is crucial: ILFI envisions state and local governments requiring a Just label as part of all public procurements, potentially having massive reach into government contractors that include everyone from construction companies to nonprofit service providers in housing, education, or health care.

Like it or not, the era of consumption as a force for social change is here. Fair trade coffee is mainstream enough that Kelly Clarkson is now doing commercials for Green Mountain, a long-established fair trade coffee brand. But how much can we really rely on consumers to transform business practices?