The production of gold has been associated with egregious labor abuses, including forced and child labor, as well as violations of community land rights and environmental degradation. Small-scale miners often labor in hazardous conditions and harsh environments while earning wages below legal minimums, in some cases indebted to employers, moneylenders or other actors or being paid in kind for their work. The gold rush of recent years has attracted the attention of a diverse set of market actors, including not only multinational companies and small-scale or artisanal miners, but also criminal networks and other unscrupulous parties.
In Thailand thousands of “sea slaves,” held captive in shoddy fishing vessels, trawl for cheap forage fish used in canned pet food. In Pakistan, children as young as five are sold or kidnapped and forced to stand knee-deep in water, packing clay into molds to make bricks. In Ghana, poisonous dust and exposure to toxic chemicals and mine collapses threaten the health and safety of children who work in the artisanal gold mines.
Nestor Molina has made a living looking for Honduran workers to pick fruit in Florida. Now, some of the workers he recruited, their lawyers, and the U.S. government are looking for him. Molina, 53, is among the middlemen hired by companies to help bring foreign workers to the United States for temporary jobs. The jobs span almost every industry, from agriculture to hospitality, and the numbers of foreign workers brought to the United States have swelled in the past two decades. In the fiscal year ending last August, the government issued more than 350,000 temporary work visas.
The official blogs of clothing retail chains tend to be filled with little more than ideas on how to combine various items of this season’s range for a great layered look. Outdoor clothing retailer Patagonia broke the mould when it announced in its company blog in July 2015 that labour brokers in Taiwan were charging migrant workers $7,000 for factory jobs, creating a form of debt akin to modern slavery. Furthermore, it continued, this was happening “in our own supply chain”.
We ended 2015 with nine posts on the issue of modern slavery in the coffeelands—this eight-part series on our research into wretched labor conditions on a small number of Brazilian coffee estates and this reflection on how that work is inspired by our mission to serve the poorest and most vulnerable people. Those posts were rather narrow in focus—one country, one specific category of labor abuse. An article we contributed to the current issue of Roast Magazine titled “Farmworkers in Coffee: Improving Conditions for the Industry’s Most Vulnerable Players” is wider in scope—it surveys the broader context of farm labor in coffee that we are working to address through our research, writing and programming.
