On any given day in 2016, more than 40m people were victims of modern slavery, says Matt Gitsham, and business leaders need to reconsider their position on the issue
Think you know about modern slavery? Think again. This article tackles six myths about modern slavery and sets out what every business leader needs to know. The article draws on research led by Hult International Business School, in partnership with the Ethical Trading Initiative. We engaged with more than 70 well-known brands that were taking steps to fight modern slavery to find out what they were doing and what they were learning about what was most effective.
Myth 1: slavery is something that died out a long time ago. No – the most recent studies estimate there are 40 million people trapped in modern slavery in the world today.
We tend to associate slavery with the African slave trade and sugar plantations in the Americas, or with ancient Greeks and Romans – a shameful practice that was thankfully eradicated more than a century ago. But the most recent major UN study estimated that on any given day in 2016, more than 40m people were victims of modern slavery.
Myth 2: ‘modern slavery’ is just a sensationalist way of describing poor labour standards. No – modern slavery is about people physically trapped in a working situation and prevented from leaving it.
People have asked me why I am calling this modern slavery: ‘Isn’t that an overemotional way of talking about labour exploitation?’
We are all familiar with stories of workers in east Asia or central America who get paid a dollar a day making T-shirts, working very long hours, maybe in unsafe conditions. These are all bad things, but this is not modern slavery. Modern slavery is referring to people who are trapped in a working situation against their will.
Take the story of a gentleman called Yum from Cambodia. He was poor and looking for work. Someone offered him work on a construction site in Thailand, it would cost money to get there but the cost of that could be deducted from the first month’s wages. When he got there it wasn’t a construction site but a sea port and he found he’d been sold to the boat captain to be a fisherman. He complained and he was beaten.
Yum spent months on the fishing boat, unable to escape, and frequently getting beaten. His story has a reasonably happy ending – eventually, while in a port in Indonesia he was able to sneak off the boat and escape; he went to the local police, and eventually he was able to get back to his family in Cambodia.
Modern slavery isn’t just a sensationalist way of talking about poor working conditions, it’s a specific term talking describing people who are trapped in working situations in which they are physically prevented from leaving. It encompasses the offences of slavery, servitude, forced labour, debt bondage and human trafficking.
Myth 3: modern slavery only happens in faraway places. No – it’s happening everywhere, right under all our noses.
How many people do you think are in slave labour conditions in your country?
The Global Slavery Index puts the UK figure at 136,000 people on any given day in 2016. For the Netherlands the number is 30,000, for the US the number is 403,000 people.
The UN study estimates four in every 1,000 people in Asia-Pacific are trapped in Forced Labour, 3.6 in every 1,000 million in Europe and Central Asia, 2.8 in every 1,000 in Africa, and 1.3 in every 1000 in the Americas.
No matter where you are, there’s a fair chance that there’s someone trapped in slave labour right under your nose.
Myth 4: modern slavery is not something that affects my business. No – some of the highest risk sectors are construction, manufacturing, mining, and agriculture, which are in most companies’ supply chains.
We’ve established that Modern slavery is a real thing and it’s a big thing, but it’s a problem for other people, it’s not something that affects my business is it, right?
Wrong again.
Modern slavery is associated with particular high risk products and services, but they’re the kinds of things that are in most companies’ supply chains at some point or another.
The same UN study estimates 4.5 million people trapped in modern slavery in the construction industry, 3.75m people in manufacturing, and 2.75 million people in agriculture and fishing. Some typical high risk products are tomatoes from Italy, prawns from Thailand, and cotton from Uzbekistan. Where does your food come from? Where does your clothing come from? Who’s doing your cleaning? Your catering? Who’s working on the building site? Who’s working in the factories you’re sourcing from or who are making the smart phones you’re buying?
The people organising this are criminal organisations and they hide what they’re doing well – there’s a high chance that modern slavery might be somewhere in your supply chain and you have no idea.
Myth 5: even if modern slavery could be happening in my supply chain, I have other things that demand my attention more than dealing with this. No – on several levels…
1 This is a moral issue. Slavery is a story of human suffering, and it’s human to care about the suffering of others. Slavery is wrong, once you know it could be happening, you cannot argue you can ignore it.
2 It is clearly illegal. Slavery is unequivocally morally wrong, so it is illegal in international law and in just about every country on the planet. You cannot ignore an issue where you might be knowingly be complicit in illegal activity.
3 Reputation: your customers and other stakeholders care, and its bad news if other people find out about slave labour in your supply chain. You don’t want you (or your customer) to be making the wrong kind of headlines in the news.
Myth 6: The causes of modern slavery are so complex that it’s too hard to do anything about it anyway. No – the companies we talked to in our research had found from their experiences that there were a number of effective steps they could take.
We’ve published a 70-page research report full of detailed case studies of different things leading companies have been doing and what they’ve been learning about what’s most effective.
I just want to try and pull out three key messages about things that are effective, and that you can and should be thinking about doing.
Know your supply chain and work with them.
The first thing is that you have to really know your supply chain. If you don’t already have one, establish a database of all the companies that supply you, then talk to them, and find out who supplies them, and who supplies them.
Once you’ve created a detailed map of your supply chain, you have to identify where the high risk parts are for modern slavery. These are the kinds of products and services talked about above: high risk food commodities from certain countries; any parts of your supply chain using agency workers or temporary labour; or any areas with high number of migrant workers.
But it’s not enough to work out where the problems are, you’ve obviously also got to do something about it. This isn’t about auditing your suppliers. Since the highest risks of modern slavery are down in tiers four and five of your supply chain, you have to work with your own suppliers to support them to fight the problem.
Work with unconventional partners – competitors, NGOs, and unions
As well as working with your suppliers, there’s some other, more unconventional partners with whom you need to work.
Often you will need to work with your competitors, which doesn’t come easily to many companies.
You need to work with NGOs, which would have been pretty unconventional a few years ago but is becoming more normal. And, still pretty controversial, you may find you might need to partner with unions.
Management and unions are not common partners, but in the case of modern slavery, some unions might be the best kind of partner you can find. The evidence certainly suggests that workers are less likely to suffer modern slavery in places where unions are recognised.
Call for more government action
Another stereotype is that business doesn’t like government intervention, but many companies have been finding that, to fight modern slavery effectively they need government to be doing more things. The UK introduced its Modern Slavery Act in 2015.
Many of the companies we spoke to in our research told us that they had lobbied the UK government to strengthen this legislation, pushing for it to include a clause that forces companies to make a public statement on what they’re doing to tackle Modern slavery.
And this kind of government intervention works. Our research indicated that since the UK Act came into force, the engagement of CEOs with modern slavery inside their companies has doubled, and the proportion of companies that are proactively working with suppliers, competitors, NGOs and others is up too.
So government action works, but it will only happen if government is confident you want it, so be vocal and public in calling for more action from government to help your company do more to fight modern slavery.
Matt Gitsham is Director of the Ashridge Centre for Business and Sustainability and Associate Professor of Sustainable Development at Hult Ashridge Executive Education. Co-authors of the research alongside Matt included Quintin Lake, Nadine Page, Jamie MacAlister and Cindy Berman.
