In the complex landscape of global labor rights, meaningful change requires looking deeper than surface-level compliance. Verité’s workplace assessments are grounded in a worker-centered approach, enabling us to uncover systemic labor challenges and expose their root causes.
Throughout Asia, Verité’s comprehensive Foreign Migrant Worker Assessments employ rigorous, triangulated methodologies that translate into tangible worker protections. By employing forensic, investigative techniques our team uncovers complex, financial exploitation associated with migrant workers’ recruitment experiences.
Companies face mounting pressures from consumers, regulators, and their own ethical and sustainability commitments when it comes to upholding workers’ rights. Through two pioneering field pilots in the Indian cotton supply chain, Verité’s U.S. Department of Labor-funded Supply Chain Tracing and Engagement Methodologies (STREAMS) project is testing innovative approaches that combine supply chain traceability with robust labor rights due diligence. These pilots represent efforts to develop an evidence-base and resources that will help companies strengthen human rights due diligence efforts proactively, rather than reactively.
International exposés of labor conditions on Thai fishing vessels have long identified a vessel’s physical structure as an inherent driver of labor risk in the industry. These findings led Nestlé and Verité to collaborate on a project exploring how Thai fishing vessels might be modified to enable long-term improvements for both the workers and vessel owners.
The most significant contributor to the ongoing presence of debt bondage or forced labor in global supply chains is the burden of recruitment fees and expenses on migrant workers. Many employers and recruiters in high risk global supply chains build business models on charging unskilled and low-skilled workers fees for employment. Specifically, employers pay no or insufficient professional service fees to the recruitment agents they engage to find them workers. Rather, they knowingly allow agents to recoup revenue and the significant legitimate expenses associated with international labor migration—such as government approvals and travel costs—from the workers themselves.
