Is Your High-Street Deal Costing Someone Their Freedom?
Written by Monique Villa
It’s Saturday afternoon in London. A colorful pair of sandals is on display at the main window of a store in Oxford Street. Its price? £1.50. Across the road, a fashionable cosmetic brand is launching its latest glittery lipstick. It’s made of mica. At the supermarket next door there’s a good offer on tea. It comes from the North-Eastern Indian region of Assam.
Appealing deals? Absolutely. But what if I told you that all of these products were produced by people, sometimes children, forced to work against their will, living in misery, and trapped in a deadly cycle of exploitation? What if I told you that these products were probably made for you by slaves?
You don’t have to take my word for it. The U.S. federal government compiles an official list of products believed to be the result of child and forced labor. It’s extensive, and includes 134 products from 73 countries, from coconuts hand-picked in the Philippines to diamonds mined in Angola. If you add to that list the evidence collected by anti-slavery NGOs around the world, the product range extends significantly to cosmetics, fish, tea and many other categories. Almost nothing is untainted.
Slavery is far from over. According to anti-slavery organization Walk Free, there are currently 30 million people enslaved around the world, the highest number in history, and roughly equivalent to the populations of Australia and Denmark combined. It is a fast-growing industry worth $32 billion a year, more than the combined profits of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s.
Cheap labor, slavery, debt bondage and human trafficking are all intertwined. The common denominator is poverty. The victims are needy and vulnerable; they don’t know their rights and may think they have nothing to lose. Little do they know that their own freedom is the ultimate price to pay.
Take India, home to half of the world’s slaves, 13 million, according to Walk Free. In the North-Eastern state of Assam, workers at the Nahorani tea plantation earn 91 pence a day for a six-day week, producing tea for some of the world’s best-selling brands. They live on-site in dilapidated homes lacking sanitation and protection from wind and rain. Last year alone, 14 young girls, daughters of the workers, went missing from the tea plantation. They were lured by traffickers with the promise of a better life in the capital and sold as domestic servants to upcoming middle-class families in Delhi, or as sex slaves in Mumbai.
Further south, the hills of Jharkhand are home to the world’s largest mica mine. Mica is a shiny mineral increasingly in demand for its use in cosmetics and paint. It is also used as an insulator for electric microchips. A recent report has exposed how the mica from the Jharkhand hills is mostly sourced by children as young as 11 years old. They work barefoot under the beating sun, at risk of snake bites and scorpion stings, and prone to contract respiratory illnesses. Some die trapped in collapsed caves. These children earn five rupees (0.08 dollars) per each kilogram of mica they mine. On the international market, depending on its quality and type, mica can fetch anywhere from several dollars a kilogram to more than $1,000. It’s estimated that last year India sold 15,000 tons of the metal. India produces 60 percent of the world’s mica.
Just over a year ago, the collapse of a factory complex at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh killed almost 1,200 workers. It was the world’s worst industrial accident in 30 years and highlighted the human costs of so-called “high-street bargains.” In what has become a global rush to “fast fashion,” high-street brands demand a weekly, constant flow of new models. In store, stock is kept intentionally low to trigger impulse buying and supply chains are expected to be increasingly responsive to the latest buying trends, hence able to readapt production in matter of hours. As a result, clothes are cheaper than ever and fly off the shelves, boosting the profits of the global textile and garment industry, one believed to be worth $3 trillion a year.
The media coverage of the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory, which produced garments for some popular UK high-street brands, triggered two major agreements: the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety and the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. The two initiatives introduced systems of factory monitoring and instruments to record workers’ training. However, the effectiveness of the two programs is believed to be of little significance given that the number of factories taking part in the scheme is less than 2,000. Currently there are 5,600 registered factories in Bangladesh, fueling an export boom worth $21 billion per year.
In the past year, the construction binge linked to some of the world’s major sporting events has also brought the building industry under the spotlight. I have personally met a Nepalese man who contracted a huge debt with a labor broker in order to get a job in an office in Qatar. Upon his arrival in the Gulf State, the man had his passport confiscated, wasn’t paid regularly, lived in apalling conditions, and worked fifteen-hour days for very little money. He had been enslaved, his freedom linked to a debt he would never be able to repay.
This is not an issue exclusive to the Gulf States. Overall, the global construction industry is one of the world’s biggest employers, with a huge migrant labor force. According to a recent report by Oxford Economics, the global construction output will continue to grow, reaching a turnover of $15 trillion worldwide by 2025—a 70 percent rise from current levels.
Despite the different nature of each of these industries, the dynamic behind the exploitation mechanism is strikingly similar. It has its roots in poverty, negligence and, most of all, corruption, the grease that fuels slavery. But the ultimate question remains: who is fueling the modern-day slave trade?
The global economic system is delivering cheap products and spreading jobs worldwide, but it is out of synch with the human rights agenda. Transnational corporations have too little accountability. Even when they do want to do the right thing, often they don’t know what is going on in their supply chains. Global corporations today are bigger and more powerful than many nation states, if you compare state GDP to net profits.
Supply chains are becoming increasingly long and complex. Companies are outsourcing their responsibility to third-party certification schemes that, in reality, do not guarantee much at all. And then there’s corruption. Many of the factories in Bangladesh where workers lost their lives, as well as hundreds of Indian factories where young girls are enslaved, have been “ethically audited.” These audits can often be lucrative corrupted shams run by local companies, outsourced by big multinationals.
Even when audits are properly enforced, they tend to miss the point. The reality is that they are often built around products, not people. Therefore they fail to address the issues within the areas of the supply chains that are most at risk. We could achieve more by auditing the process by which migrant workers enter a company or its supplier’s operations. Have they paid thousands of dollars of debt to a labor broker to get those jobs overseas? If so, they are generally enduring working conditions that are often deeply exploitative.
There are good stories of success, but they are mostly local, such as the Transparency in Supply Chain Act, introduced just over a year ago in California. Similar measures have been successfully implemented in Brazil.
However, an increasingly global economy calls for international standards and regulations. We have them across the airline industry, why shouldn’t we have them to keep slavery out of supply chains?
But global regulation is not the only answer. If we use the market as a force for good we could see change, and at a much faster pace. Governments can take years to pass laws and then never enforce them, while a major corporation has the capacity to switch suppliers in a day, making a huge impact in the market and changing the lives of millions of individuals by virtue of how they decide to source. There should be real incentives for companies that decide to tackle slavery in the supply chain. It’s unrealistic to expect that they will spend money to map their supply chains if competitors who choose to do nothing can easily get away with it and rake in more profits. If we want multinationals to prevent slaves from entering their supply chains, we need to speak profit and risk. Companies should be prepared to collectively change the rules of the game and pay a higher production price.
On the other hand, it is of paramount importance that consumers are ultimately educated. We’ll know we are on the right track only when shoppers see a £1.50 pair of sandals as a red flag, not a bargain.
