Verité has identified a number of factors that increase workers’ vulnerability to becoming victims of human trafficking, all of which will likely worsen during and after the COVID-19 crisis, including poverty, inequality, political instability, conflict, crime/violence, and tightening of restrictions on immigration.
A growing number of multinational corporations and their suppliers have begun to adopt “Employer Pays” recruitment policies. The purpose of this white paper from Verité is to identify, map, and assess the impact and potential application of contract clauses, ethical recruitment bonds, and insurance policies for promoting sustained compliance with key migrant worker standards, while mitigating financial risk to employers.
Verité conducted desk and field research to map out how jobseekers in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Lao PDR learn about jobs in Thailand, weigh risk factors and choose among the routes open to them. Through interviews with people on or connected with this journey, a picture emerged of a highly complex arena in which the needs of jobseekers, job-finders, employers, regulators, facilitators, and profiteers meet.
This past February, Verité released a new research study on the nature and indicators of forced labor and human trafficking for labor exploitation in the cocoa sector of Côte d’Ivoire. The report is accompanied by a comprehensive set of actionable recommendations for government, industry, and civil society to address the problem through strategic, targeted programming.
Migrant workers trafficked into the Thai fishing industry are sometimes described as ‘sold to the sea.’ These men, particularly work-seeking Burmese, often face a perfect storm of poverty-based need and debt bondage, extreme hardship, physical danger and isolation—corporate accountability lost in opaque supply chains, the regulatory dead space of international waters and scarce enforcement where laws apply.