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on Sat Nov 1 02:47:03 2014
fiogf49gjkf0d Reuters via Toronto Globe and Mail
Slavery is a business reality, and it's up to companies to stop itPublished Tuesday, Oct. 28 2014, 4:06 PM EDT
Last updated Wednesday, Oct. 29 2014, 1:59 PM EDTThere are more slaves now than at any point in history, and companies need to look closely at their supply chains to ensure their products or services aren’t coming from operations that force people to work with no pay, a U.S. writer and private-equity executive said during a recent financial and risk summit in Toronto hosted by media and information firm Thomson Reuters.
Unlike governments that typically take years to tackle the widespread problem of modern-day slavery, today’s companies can take action and make significant changes in a matter of days, Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous and co-founder of New York-based Tau Investment Management LLC, told his audience at the summit.
“What I found was that when you highlight slavery in corporate supply chains and you name the world’s largest corporations, something remarkable can happen. When you name a corporation … that company can make change in 48 hours where it would take governments 10 years to pass the law, and then never enforce it.”
People often think of slavery as a thing of the past, but today there are an estimated 27 million slaves worldwide — most of them toiling for nothing more than a meager daily meal, Skinner said. He plotted on a map where most of these slaves can be found today: India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
“In these countries, what you see in massive numbers in many cases are entire villages held in what the United Nations calls collateralized hereditary debt bondage — people held to a debt they themselves didn’t take,” Skinner explained. “I found some individuals and families working off debts that date several generations back, and they were still working in rock quarries from sunup to sundown, breaking rocks and turning gravel that are produced into silica sand.”
But slavery isn’t restricted to countries on other continents, Skinner said. It’s also a problem in North America, especially among people in marginalized communities who may not speak English or French and who don’t have the proper documents to live and work in the United States or Canada.
Slave labor is a business reality, he said, and it often becomes part of a company’s supply chains either because it has failed to do the proper due diligence on its vendors, or worse, because it has willfully turned a blind eye to the problem.
As an example, Skinner told a story about an Indonesian man who accepted a job on a fishing trawler that had its course set for the waters off the coast of New Zealand. The man, who had limited reading and writing skills, was herded into a closed room with other job applicants and made to sign a contract that stated he and the other workers would not be paid anything for three months, and that they would forfeit all personal property if they walked away from service for any reason.
“He wound up on the Mellila 203, a rust bucket,” Skinner said. “The conditions he found on board this vessel were the kind of conditions you would expect in a galley ship in the 19th century — no clean water, so the workers had no ability to clean themselves; they were fed, in some cases, fish bait; and they were physically, verbally and sexually abused systemically and in a way that seemed designed to humiliate and break their will to speak out.”
The companies that were buying fish from the fishing vessel’s owners were largely unaware of these workers’ brutal enslavement because the observers they hired to monitor labor practices on these ships often filed false reports, Skinner said.
Skinner wrote an article exposing the brutal enslavement of men on fishing vessels and calling out some of the companies whose products were traced back to the ships. But “naming and shaming” isn’t the best, long-term solution to the problem of slavery, he said. What’s needed instead are investments that can actually change the thinking in operations that use slave or extremely underpaid labor. For example, giving a business money to upgrade to a more efficient energy system lowers fuel costs and allows the company to pay its workers a fair wage without changing its bottom line.
Tau Investment Management, the private equity firm Mr. Skinner co-founded, is taking this approach to the garment industry overseas. The company is closing its first fund and plans to clean up garment factories by taking a stake in the business and implementing solutions such as better energy management and employee engagement programs. Beyond delivering solid financial returns, Tau will help clean up supply chains by improving transparency and creating safer conditions for workers, Skinner said.
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