Full Disclosure: Toward Better Modern Slavery Reporting | Conflict and Mass Displacement Increase Child Labor in Middle East and North Africa | New Report: Realizing the Benefits of Worker Reporting Digital Tools | “Apple Deserves Kudos for Doing Right by Workers” | The Software that Shapes Workers’ Lives
Links to stories we’re talking about in March 2018.
Iju-Sha is the term for Filipinos in Japan, most having come for work. Like the tens of millions of people around the world who migrate for a job, they arrive in pursuit of the promise of better wages, skills training and career opportunities. As Verité shows in our new documentary, Iju-Sha: Reportage on Migrant Workers in Japan, this may not be what they find.
Solving supply chain Code of Conduct violations will take multi-faceted interventions. I was privileged to facilitate a panel on “Slavery in the Supply Chain” at the annual Trust Women Conference organized by the Thomson Reuters Foundation that presented some solutions, and challenges, to an audience of smart and committed people from business, government, media, advocacy and law. Conferences like this demonstrate that there are in many cases existing, effective solutions to pressing problems like forced labor in supply chains. In private conversations, I’ve been emphasizing lately the opportunity and urgency for companies to adopt these existing solutions now rather than await the invention of something new. Much benefit—to vulnerable workers, their employers, brands and other supply chain ‘owners’—can be achieved almost immediately if companies were to take steps like HP has (outlined in this newsletter elsewhere), and as we’ve described Apple doing in the past.
Verité’s two-year study of labor conditions in electronics manufacturing in Malaysia found that one in three foreign workers surveyed was in a condition of forced labor. Companies and their stakeholders have asked us to elaborate on what they should do address the problem of forced labor in supply chains.