Impoverished migrant workers in Thailand are sold or lured by false promises and forced to catch and process fish that ends up in global food giant Nestle SA’s supply chains. The unusual disclosure comes from Geneva-based Nestle SA itself, which in an act of self-policing announced the conclusions of its yearlong internal investigation on Monday. The study found virtually all U.S. and European companies buying seafood from Thailand are exposed to the same risks of abuse in their supply chains.Nestle SA, among the biggest food companies in the world, launched the investigation in December 2014, after reports from news outlets and nongovernmental organizations tied brutal and largely unregulated working conditions to their shrimp, prawns and Purina brand pet foods. Its findings echo those of The Associated Press in reports this year on slavery in the seafood industry that have resulted in the rescue of more than 2,000 fishermen.
Global food giant Nestle said it has found that its Thailand seafood suppliers are engaged in abusive labor practices — a risk many companies face when sourcing from the country’s fishing industry.
For the last two years, Verité has been meeting with migrant workers in the electronics sector in Malaysia to understand their experiences. Our findings shocked us – one in three of the hundreds of thousands of migrants working in Malaysian electronics manufacturing is in a condition of forced labor. These Burmese, Nepalis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Vietnamese, Thais, Indonesians and Filipinos work in modern factories. But because they are foreigners they are often employed by third-party labor agents rather than the factories themselves.
New Research Addressing Forced Labor in the Cocoa Sector in Côte D’Ivoire Verité is pleased to release a new independent research study on the nature and indicators of forced labor and human trafficking for labor exploitation in the cocoa sector in Côte...
As the minutes ticked by on the afternoon of April 28, 2015, Harold Vilches watched stoically while customs officers at Santiago’s international airport scrutinized his carry-on. Inside the roller bag was 44 pounds of solid gold, worth almost $800,000, and all the baby-faced, 21-year-old college student wanted was clearance to get on a red-eye to Miami. Vilches had arrived at the airport six hours early because he thought there might be some trouble—he’d heard that customs had recently seized shipments from competing smugglers. But Vilches had done this run, or sent people to do it, more than a dozen times, and he’d prepared his falsified export paperwork with extra care. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t have any trouble. While he waited, he texted his contacts in Florida, telling them he’d already cleared customs. The plan was to hand off the gold at the Miami airport to a pair of guards, who would load it into an armored truck for the short trip to NTR Metals Miami LLC, a company that buys gold in quantities large and small and sells it into the global supply chain.
Peru, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, has a new booming illicit business: gold. Illegal gold mining has surged in the South American country, the world’s fifth biggest gold exporter. A new Univision Investigative report shows that the criminal organizations that traffic illegal drugs have diversified and are now in the business of trading the precious metal. “There are signs that people engaged in criminal activities, like narco trafficking and terrorism are involved in illegal gold mining,” said Tania Quispe, the Director of SUNAT, Peru’s equivalent of the I.R.S. The agency is in charge of monitoring illegal gold mining.
