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.
Many company’s forced labor, human trafficking, or ‘modern day slavery’ disclosures – whether mandated by transparency regulations or part of broader sustainability, corporate social responsibility, or human rights reporting – do not reflect a credible understanding of how specific practices of value chain partners and recruitment intermediaries in their supply chains expose vulnerable workers to the risk of forced labor. Consequently, many of the detection and prevention efforts outlined in these disclosures are not sufficiently targeted to effectively address the root causes of these insidious and deeply entrenched abuses.
Two companies that have worked extensively with Verité to detect and prevent forced labor and human trafficking in their supply chains, NXP Semiconductors and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), have won the inaugural Thomson Reuters Foundation Stop Slavery Award. The initiative recognizes companies that have taken concrete steps to eradicate forced labor from their supply chains. The aim is to create a virtuous cycle, a positive paradigm to demonstrate that business can play a critical role in putting an end to modern-day slavery worldwide.
The Leadership Group for Responsible Recruitment formally launched in London on May 4th with an ambitious announcement of its intention to eradicate the charging of recruitment fees to workers within a decade. Labor recruitment fees charged to vulnerable workers are a major contributing factor to forced labor in global supply chains and the Leadership Group is squarely focused on promoting the ‘Employer Pays Principle’ and facilitating its implementation across all industries and geographies.
