Child labourers rescued in Delhi waiting to be sent back to their villages. Credit: Bachpan Bachao Andolan/IPS

By Farangis Abdurazokzoda
WASHINGTON, Apr 16 2014 (IPS)

Modern-day slavery can be eradicated from multinational supply chains, but only if global businesses contribute to greater transparency and collaboration, according to new recommendations by Sedex Global and Verite.

“Human trafficking and slavery in the supply chain are global issues,” Mark Robertson, head of marketing and communications at Sedex Global, which provides a collaborative platform for responsible supply-chain data, told IPS.“Modern day slavery carries risks for companies. It can seriously affect a brand’s reputation.” -- Mark Robertson

“But these issue are not unsolvable and there are good examples of companies – and initiatives – tackling the issue.”

There are thought to be some 11.7 million victims of forced labour in Asia, followed by 3.7 million in Africa and 1.8 million in Latin America. Slave labour is part of the production of at least 122 consumer goods from 58 countries, according to the 2012 International Labour Organisation statistics listed in the briefing.

The U.S. federal government compiles its own such list of products produced by slave or child labour. According to the latest update, last year, some 134 goods from 73 countries use child or forced labour in the production processes.

Certain sectors are particularly vulnerable to human trafficking and forced labour. According to the new briefing and backed up by these other lists, particularly problematic sectors include agriculture, mining and forestry, as well as manufacturers of apparel, footwear and electronics.

“Asia is the source of many of the world’s manufactured goods, and also home to half the world’s human trafficking – the majority of which is forced labour,” Anti-Slavery International’s Lisa Rende Taylor notes in the report.

Almost 21 million people are victims of human trafficking worldwide, according to the briefing, 55 percent of whom are women and girls.

Migrant workers and indigenous populations are considered particularly vulnerable to forced labour. The briefing highlights issues that analysts say have not yet been sufficiently addressed, such as “broker-induced hiring traps”, exacerbated by steadily increasing volumes of migrant workers all around the world.

“For workers, labour brokerage increases migration and job acquisition costs and the risk of serious exploitation, including slavery,” the report states. Further, the presence of both well-organised and informal brokerage companies “in all cases” increases migrant vulnerability.

“The debt that is often necessary for migrant workers to undertake in order to pay recruitment fees, when combined with the deception that is visited upon them by some brokers about job types and salaries, can lead to a situation of debt-bondage,” the report states.

Globalised supply chains

Sedex and Verite highlight the importance of sourcing from responsible businesses and offer recommendations for both brands and suppliers on how to engage in ethical practices in supply chains.

“We are hoping to help companies understand the risks that they and their partners face with regard to the modern slavery,” Dan Viederman, the CEO of Verite, a watchdog group, told IPS. “It takes more commitment from companies to really understand what is happening amongst the hidden process among their business partners.”

Viederman says the new campaign by Verite and Sedex Global will work to motivate companies and their suppliers.

Globalisation and “complex and multi-tiered” supply chains have made it massively more difficult to detect forced labour and human trafficking, the new report states. Thus, “companies need tools, protocols and policies to effectively audit trafficking and to establish mechanisms to protect workers.”

The briefing recommends companies step up actions to “raise awareness internationally and externally of the risks of human trafficking” and to establish corporate policies to address related issues. Particularly important is to “map supply chains, which would help identify vulnerable workers and places of greatest risk.”

Sedex Global, with over 36,000 partners, allows member companies to upload all social audit types, which are primary tools for brands to assess their own facilities and those of their suppliers to detect workers abuse.

The Sedex platform highlights social audits, conducted between 2011 and 2013, that show that a “lack of adequate policies, management and reporting on forced labour” as well as a “lack of legally recognised employment agreements, wages and benefits” can indicate a risk of forced labour being present.

“Modern day slavery carries risks for companies,” Robertson says. “It can seriously affect a brand’s reputation.”

Nor is slavery an issue that affects only developing countries.

“Since 2007, more than 3,000 cases of labour trafficking inside the United States have been reported – nearly a third from 2013 alone,” Bradley Myles, the CEO of the Polaris Project, a U.S. anti-trafficking group, says in the new report.

“And there are so many more people who are trapped that we haven’t heard from yet. Business can and should take steps to eradicate this form of modern slavery from their operations and supply chains.”

California model

Consumers also have enormous power – if they use it. But “the issue has not pervaded the conscience of society quite yet,” Karen Stauss, director of programmes for Free the Slaves, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The word hasn’t gotten out. Consumer power, the company’s buying as well legislative powers, should all be part of the resolution.”

Stauss says a good model comes from a state law here in the United States, called the California Transparency in Supply Chain Act, or SB-657. This would require publicly traded companies to disclose what efforts they are making to eradicate human trafficking and slavery from their supply chains.

Many companies, however, do not yet appear to have formal anti-slavery policies. According to the Corporate and Social Responsibility press release, out of 129 companies urged to conform with the California law by Know the Chain, an anti-slavery group, only 11 have done so.

The director of communications of Humanity United, Tim Isgitt said, “After months of outreach to these corporations, approximately 21 percent on the list are still not in compliance with the law.”

“It is necessary to push all businesses, not only progressive ones, to be more transparent to their customers and their investors in their supply chains,” Free the Slaves’ Stauss says.

“Although multinationals might not be directly involved in the exploitation of forced labour, they can help confront it by using their buying power to influence their direct and marginal partners who are involved in the production of the raw materials, where human trafficking and forced slavery are most prevalent.”

Child labourers rescued in Delhi waiting to be sent back to their villages. Credit: Bachpan Bachao Andolan/IPS

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Jan 28 2014 (IPS)

Advocacy groups and some legislators are calling on the U.S. government to mandate an increase in corporate supply chain transparency, with the aim of cutting down on the estimated 14,000 to 17,000 people trafficked into the United States each year and the tens of millions enslaved globally.

“Human trafficking is a 32-billion-dollar industry, second only to drug trafficking as an organised crime,” Melysa Sperber, director of the Alliance to End Slavery and Trafficking (ATEST), a coalition of human rights groups, told a briefing on Capitol Hill on Monday. “Between 21 and 30 million people are enslaved worldwide.” “We’ve seen kids work for 20 cents a day to buy a couple of potatoes when they go home after a full day of heavy manual labour." -- Karen Stauss

ATEST and its member organisations are working to address one of the underlying mechanisms in forced labour: global corporate supply chains. The coalition is urging lawmakers to adopt legislation that would require companies earning over 100 million dollars per year to file reports on their supply chain and labour management practices, both with U.S. regulators and on their websites.

Because of the complexity of global supply chains, companies are often unaware of coercive labour practices carried out by suppliers and subsidiaries.

“We’ve found that vulnerability to forced labour is pretty pervasive in a number of industries,” Quinn Kepes, the research programme manager for Verite, an NGO focused on labour issues in global supply chains, told IPS. “A large number of companies are at a high risk of having trafficking in their supply chains.”

Businesses often turn to labour brokers at all levels of the supply chain. These brokers, who face very little regulation, can charge workers exorbitant recruitment fees and have received widespread criticism for misrepresenting the work that the people they recruit will be doing.

“Labour recruitment has been a huge issue if you look at the construction of U.S. Army installations in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Karen Stauss, the director of programmes for Free the Slaves, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS. “There’s been a lot of documentation of trafficking of workers from South Asia to the Middle East for low-cost construction.”

The U.S. mainland is also not immune to unethical labour recruiters.

In 2012, Omelyan Botsvynyuk, a Ukrainian, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for smuggling Ukrainian citizens to the United States under false pretences. Although Botsvynyuk and his brothers had promised the men that they would be paid 500 dollars a month, they were forced to clean major retail store chains, such as Target and Walmart, without pay.

Botsvynyuk reportedly told the men that they could not leave until they had worked off their debts, ranging to as high as 50,000 dollars.

Such debt bondage is a common tactic used by exploitative recruiters and businesses. Employers can directly levy debts on employees for the use of living facilities and tools needed for the job, such as mining equipment.

“In some cases, debt bondage is happening to people who are not literate and don’t understand how debt and interest accumulates,” said Stauss. “They’re not even aware themselves of how debt is illegally exploited.”

Stauss says that the extraction of so-called conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo has also been found to rely heavily on child labour. Such materials are key components in modern consumer goods.

“We’ve seen kids work there for 20 cents a day to buy a couple of potatoes when they go home after a full day of heavy manual labour,” Stauss said. “Those minerals connect to many different things like laptops, cell phones and electronics.”

Child labour is equally present in the manufacturing sector. A new report from Harvard University found 1,406 specific cases of child labour in the Indian carpet-making industry, which exports extensively to the United States and other industrialised countries.

The Harvard researchers estimate that forced labour makes up 45 percent of the industry’s work force, with child labour specifically accounting for around a fifth.

Encouraging transparency

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama named January the National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month. “As we work to dismantle trafficking networks and help survivors rebuild their lives, we must also address the underlying forces that push so many into bondage,” the president stated.

Although currently proposed legislation would not compel companies to take any actual action on questionable supply chain practices, the groups say public pressure is building.

“Right now we don’t have a piece of legislation introduced,” ATEST’s Sperber told IPS. “But [two representatives] in the House of Representatives are supportive of an introduction of legislation that has already been introduced in past Congresses.”

A House of Representatives bill that would require greater transparency for third parties bringing foreign workers to the U.S. is currently sitting in committee.

This proposal “would combat human trafficking, forced labour and exploitation by requiring that workers coming to the United States receive accurate information about the job, visa and working conditions,” Shandra Woworuntu, an anti-trafficking lobbyist, told Monday’s briefing. “The bill also ensures that no recruitment fee is charged to the workers and requires the recruitment agency to register with the Department of Labour.”

Woworuntu herself was flown to the U.S. by a third party agency promising her a job at a hotel in Chicago. After paying a recruitment fee and arriving in the United States, she says the man who picked her up confiscated her passport and forced her into sexual slavery until she was able to escape.

While Congress has not taken action on transparency legislation at the federal level, the state of California has already introduced similar legislation. Yet while that law, known as SB-657, was slated to take effect starting at the beginning of 2012, advocates note that the state has yet to fully implement the law.

“Two years later, [SB-657] hasn’t been implemented,” Ima Matul, a coordinator for the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), told IPS. “We’ve been asking the California attorney-general for those corporations and businesses to release any trafficking or slavery involved in their supply chains.”

In the meantime, CAST has endorsed a website called Know the Chain, which catalogues corporations and their supply chains, allowing consumers to better ascertain whether or not forced labour is involved in the products they buy.

“While some companies have not yet posted disclosure statements, others have taken an important first step by posting a statement addressing the majority of SB-657 requirements,” Know the Chain states on its website.

Thus, while California’s state law lacks enforcement, some companies are voluntarily disclosing information on their supply chains and labour practices.

“Kmart, for example, just joined the movement and promised not to have slavery involved in their supply chain,” says Matul.