Slavery and forced labour in supply chains

Slavery and forced labour

May Day Speech

Diana Holland

Diana Holland, Chair of the ITUC Women's Committee; National Organiser, Women, Race and Equalities, Unite (T&G Section)

Notes for a speech at the Anti-Slavery Conference: 'The challenges in contemporary forms of slavery and forced labour in the international supply chain: mitigating risk, promoting abolition'

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Colleagues, friends

Thank you for the invitation. Apart from my role as Chair of the ITUC Women's Committee I represent the TUC's largest affiliate, Unite the Union. Unite covers most of the sectors in Britain where evidence of forced labour has emerged, so we have an immediate interest.

I am - on May Day - the only trade union speaker here and while I want to discuss some of what we know about forced labour in British and global supply chains and the partnership responses to them, I don't want to miss the opportunity to convey, from the trade union perspective, some key points about components of an effective and coherent strategy to combat forced labour.

Let me start with that. Of course, the British and international trade union movement supports effective partnership approaches. Bringing together the power of governments, trade unions and employers - and, indeed, working in principled alliance with NGOs - creates a global alliance that can be more effective than the individual parts of the sum.

And it isn't rocket science that true alliances between independent partners have the capacity to deliver more than the sum of the parts. You may have heard this before, but it bears repeating: in the struggle against forced labour, of which trafficking is a subset, we start from the same premise as when we seek to achieve the full realisation of other fundamental human rights that ensure we can work in freedom: trade union freedoms and freedom from discrimination and child labour.

That premise is, essentially, that there are two ways that working people are protected sustainably: through the rule of good law, properly enforced in democratic states, and through our own self-organisation in free, independent and democratic trade unions. And it is important to stress the universality of those fundamental human rights: if they were not universal they could not be described as human rights. Full respect for those rights is essential to decent work - work in freedom, dignity and security. It goes without saying that forced labour is the antithesis of decent work - it is not work in freedom but work in unfreedom.

Of course, international law on forced labour is laid down in a number of international instruments - ILO Convention 29 above all - but also, among others, in other ILO, UN and Council of Europe instruments. And, of course, it is governments, as the authorities of ratifying States Parties, which have the responsibility to ensure that those global obligations are transposed into national law and practice. True, many countries continue to show little evidence of the commitment needed to get to grips with the challenge. But there has been progress too. Brazil is a good example of the difference made by genuine political will and the added value of active tripartite partnership. I'm sure Roger could tell you much more about that.

Because law alone - though essential as well as an obligation - isn't enough. History shows us that slaves were not simply victims of oppression waiting for liberation by munificent white people - they fought for freedom through various forms of resistance, including full blown revolt - they fought through organisation.

But today we all agree that, even if slavery might still be profitable in the short term, it is a violation of the most fundamental human rights, and must be abolished once and for all. And if that is the case, then governments and employers must recognize that effective recognition and protection of the right to organise is an indispensable weapon in the struggle. There has to be a workplace, organizing, industrial relations response too.

And there, at the national level, is the rub. Too many governments are prepared - despite their obligations - to equivocate on these fundamental rights. And, of course, the most disempowered workers in the labour market are those in forced labour. There is an obvious relationship between the two: governments everywhere ignore the rights of the most vulnerable, poorest and excluded and even where good law exists, the disenfranchised are often not protected under the rule of law unless they organise to claim their rights.

If we look at where forced labour exists in the global economy, just as with child labour, key indicators are the presence of structural discrimination and absence of the rule of law or of the right to organize.

It is worth stressing that, while we have agreed criteria for determining when forced labour is the right description for a relationship, it is a continuum. Similarly, the informal and formal economies are a continuum and the regulated and protected and unregulated and unprotected overlap and intertwine.

Bearing that in mind, we can identify some sectors where forced labour is particularly significant: agriculture, domestic service, sex work, export processing zones, construction (including brick-making), mining, commercial cleaning services, care services, food processing, transport - especially merchant shipping - prisons and certain forms of military service. I must underline the prevalence of feminised sectors among those most affected. And I'd like to repeat the reference to merchant shipping: are companies sure their 'ethically' produced goods aren't being transported on Chinese ships employing effectively indentured (perhaps Burmese) seafarers?

And so, alongside conditions which amount to forced labour in formal economy TGL factories in export processing zones, directly and openly linked to global supply chains - withholding passports, demanding deposits from workers, imposing compulsory, often unpaid, overtime amounting to total hours of 100 a week or more, which have caused the deaths of women workers in Bangladesh - subcontracted production and the sourcing of raw materials stretching easily into the informal economy provide entry points into global supply chains of forced labour that is harder to detect and harder to combat. Think for example of the current challenge faced by brands seeking to eliminate child labour from their garment supply chains in India when the cotton comes in large part from Uzbekistan.

The normal CSR mantra opposes cherry-picking and cut and run. It demands that brands and retailers stay put when they find violations of labour standards in their supply chains, supporting the local employer to put things right and only terminating contracts if there is no prospect of remediation. That itself is an example of a partnership approach.

But the Uzbek example requires more than an individual contract-compliance approach. It requires a partnership of government, the ILO, global brands and Global Union Federations working to support a national level programme with local actors.

Let's consider another major challenge in which a simple contract compliance approach is unlikely to bear fruit. MNEs are neither stupid nor ignorant. When they entered the Chinese labour market they knew they were shifting production to a country in workers had no rights to organise or bargain or to freedom of expression. The Chinese government knows full well that MNEs aren't going to leave even if some demand further suppression of wage costs by threatening to move to even cheaper production bases. So the reaction to the crisis of excessive overtime in China can't be characterized as a cherry-picking dilemma.

There is a detectable shift in China, I think, with government more prepared - within the constraints of a dictatorship - to entertain better protection for workers. But while the presence of ETI member companies raising the issue may have coincided with that shift and perhaps encouraged the debate a little, I suspect that it was the constraints of the labour market and pressure from below that led to the change. The Chinese authorities are beginning, it seems, to understand that the pot is boiling and that simply putting more weights on the lid is not a sustainable solution - safety valves are needed to release the pressure and avoid an explosion.

At the same time, again if enough brands and retailers are prepared to work together - in partnership - to create a sufficient critical mass in favour of core labour standards, then they might be able to exert more influence.

But that is another conundrum: we are constantly told by companies that wish - or claim they wish - to take a long term approach to investment and improvement in labour standards through constructing more stable supply chains, that they are undermined by the pressures of a competitive market, price-wars and the short-termism of competitors and city analysts.

No doubt that is true. Alongside the Global Alliance Against Forced Labour one of the alliances we need - how timely this is, given the looming crisis created by the almost nihilistic short-termism of casino capitalism - is an alliance for long termism. It isn't enough for European Social Model trade unionists and politicians to talk about it. If you really want decent work for all, we need at least sufficient market regulation to enable companies to trade ethically - to trade in support of core labour standards - and not find all their efforts thwarted by the asset-stripping hedge funders and the speculating fly-boys of the City. Economies may be complex, but they are not supernatural forces - they are human constructions and must be subject to human control.

These are real pressures and one of the responses that Lakshmi will, I'm sure be talking about this afternoon is how to ensure purchasing practices support labour standards. There is a direct correlation and it is a key debate in the ETI. If you order products from a supplier but give insufficient lead times, excessive overtime and/or subcontracting to unregulated suppliers will result. If unit prices are insufficient, the elastic element is wages - so either there is greater pressure to deny workers the right to bargain collectively and/or there is, subcontracting to unregulated suppliers who will employ child labour or adults workers in conditions in which their freedoms are violated. So if you pay a 'quarter nafri' don't bleat that you are surprised to find abuses in your supply chain. Your pricing structure made the abuse inevitable.

Let me move now to some reflections on forced labour in the UK and on the relationship between trafficking and migration.

First, my union has been leading the field in our work with Kalayaan, the NGO that supports domestic workers, especially from the Philippines. A result of that long relationship was the establishment of a union of domestic workers, associated with the T&G. We also worked together on the 'That's my Passport' campaign - publicizing the right of migrant domestic workers to keep possession of their travel documents and the illegality of employers confiscating them.

We have worked with the TUC, under the ETI umbrella, in the successful campaign to regulate gangmasters. Much still to do in enforcement, but an advance none the less.

We have worked with the TUC, organizing in the wake of the bilateral agreement with Portuguese CGTP national trade union centre, recruiting migrant Portuguese workers in Britain. We are now doing the same with Solidarnosc and OPZZ. The TUC has produced labour rights guides in most accession state languages as well as other key European languages. And do you know: in a period of overall stagnation in trade union membership, the Agricultural Trades Group of Unite has increased membership every quarter for the last three years - precisely by embracing into our organization the migrant workers that make up such a large proportion of Britain's agricultural workforce? Similar things can be said of food processing.

I mention those sectors in particular, not just because we organise in them but because some of the worst examples of forced labour in the British supply chains of supermarkets have come to light there. Do I need to repeat the apocryphal reports of workers from all over Europe and the world, housed in leaking caravans and sheds, paid less than the minimum wage, with deductions for job facilitation, transport, accommodation and equipment, passports held by the employer and threatened with deportation and violence if they complain? We've heard such tales from Cornwall to Lincolnshire and beyond: Portuguese and other EU citizens ignorant of their rights, Ukrainian, South African, Chinese and more. Brought here to fill essential labour market gaps - the Government's points system isn't going to deal with this - gaps that restrictive migration controls prevent from being filled completely by legal migrants - perhaps all the more so as the Poles begin to return home.

Before I say some more about migration rules and the lack of protection for migrant workers which can tip them - with the failure of coherent public policy to protect all working people in these shores - into de facto conditions of forced labour, what about the public and privatized public sector. How about the nurses in Glasgow, threatened with dismissal (and therefore deportation) if they refused to pay Rachmanite rents to a landlord for lousy accommodation facilitated by the NHS hospital as part of their contract]? How about those care-home workers, tricked into thinking they were going to do well-paid nursing work, then being told their qualifications weren't recognized and that they could only do the lowest paid menial tasks? In these conditions - which are types of trafficking because they involve deception - modern debt bondage can ensue.

And what are we going to do together about prison labour? The ILO is very clear: only in an approximation of a free and voluntarily entered into employment relationship and under public supervision may a prisoner provide goods or services for a private company. The Government prefers not to accept that jurisprudence - not surprising given that the jurisprudence is also very clear: all work performed in privatized prisons is a breach of the ILO Convention on forced labour.

And sex work too: whatever your moral stance, sex workers have the same fundamental rights at work as other workers. They work in a sector that has a large element of hazardous work and into which, globally, a significant number of women, children and indeed men, are trafficked in conditions of forced labour. All over the world, sex workers are organizing too, and the stronger their organizations the better they will be able to combat trafficking and forced labour and demand that their rights too are protected under the rule of law.

But we need to be wary about the conflation of sex work and trafficking and of trafficking and migration - that's why I have concentrated on other sectors today. Not all sex workers are trafficked, whatever the prurient gutter press would like to pretend, and not all trafficking takes place across borders. We want an end to trafficking and forced labour in every sector, but it will not be furthered in the sex sector or in food processing by immigration raids purporting to be anti-trafficking raids. Remember Cuddles Sauna in Birmingham? The women working there who were EU citizens were back at work within 24 hours of the raid.

The prime purpose of the law must be to protect victims against violations of their fundamental human rights - an obligation which must take precedence over immigration control because protecting universal human rights (in this case the right not to be subject to forced labour) is a non-negotiable international obligation. The Government has signed the new Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking - which places victim protection at the heart - but will only ratify, it says 'when it is fully compliant'. We are waiting.

On migration rules, the TUC view is clear - if fundamental rights at work are dependent on legal migration status, they cease to be human rights. The use by unscrupulous employers of the threat of deportation against migrant workers (even against documented migrants who just don't know they're legal) is widespread. And indeed, if you complain about unpaid wages or poor conditions your employer (or more likely, the user enterprise of agency workers) may not only shop you to the UK Border Agency, you won't have the right to go to an Employment Tribunal to get the six months wages you're owed before you get put on a plane at Stansted.

The new points system won't solve that. If anything it will make it worse but closing further the chance of arriving and working legally. It's as though the Government, with an eye on the Daily Mail reading swing constituencies, has decided that 'British' voters would prefer no migrants to fresh vegetables and cleaned offices. Among the worst proposals are those to withdraw recently implemented protections that allowed abused domestic workers to leave an employer and stay in Britain. Unfortunately, throughout Europe, perhaps with the exception of Spain, political exploitation of non-EU immigration is the current trend.

Responses to these challenges require partnerships, political will and commitment. The ETI provided us with the umbrella for the Gangmasters' Act, bringing together the trade unions, the supermarkets, the farmers and, indeed, the labour brokers. That is a success story. We need to do the same with prison labour. The ETI is also providing us, through its purchasing practice group, an opportunity to explore not just the implications of current practice but how to do it better. The confidence built up over a decade of shared work in ETI means that there is a degree of openness between the company, union and NGO members that can lead to better results. It doesn't always work, of course, as the current Unite campaign against M&S's treatment of agency workers demonstrates. David Arkless, CEO of Manpower - with which we have a collective agreement - recently called for universal ratification of ILO Convention 181 on Private Employment Agencies as a key tool to combat forced labour and trafficking. How right he is.

At the global level, Global Framework Agreements between multinationals and Global Union Federations provide a clear framework for action and at the wider sectoral level, the agreements in the cocoa and tobacco sectors are examples to be honed and emulated.

And at the global policy level we need a partnership of coherence: genuine recognition of the indivisibility and universality of fundamental rights at work, genuine promotion and enforcement of those rights. Governments, companies, trade unions and civil society organizations all have a role to play in the Global Alliance against Forced Labour. The ITUC in seeking to promote the message through the Global Workers' Alliance which we see as part of that broader coalition. Partnership requires us to recognize and respect the independence of each party and the different but complementary roles we have (that's a reminder to NGOs not to seek to bargain with companies on behalf of workers they don't represent); and for the law to ensure that we can play those roles in full freedom. It is, after all, work in freedom which is our shared and universal goal.