Whose responsibility is it, to tackle modern slavery? was the question for the 96th OSPAs thought leadership webinar this afternoon. The answer that the audience heard was; everybody’s. For trafficked and exploited people pass through ports, work in mines, and fields, and factories; and then there was the case of 39 smuggled Vietnamese people found dead in the back of a lorry in Essex – smuggled people not being the same as trafficked, as one of the panel, NGO man Andrew Wallis pointed out; but smuggled people can be vulnerable to being exploited.
As all that implies, there’s a spectrum of the crime, and a lack of a legal or other agreed definition of ‘modern’ slavery. Andrew Wallis of the charity Unseen offered a definition of modern slavery as an ‘illicit commodity trade; the commodity is a human being, bought, sold and exploited, to generate enormous profits’. The profits from such supply and demand is in the hundreds of billions of pounds a year, he suggested: “It’s a vast financial criminality that’s going on. The reason people engage in this illicit trade is because there is huge profits and low chance of prosecution.” It’s an economic crime, he went on, whether of forced labour, sexual exploitation, or servitude; ‘it’s all about money’; due to our insatiable demand for cheap goods and labour, and the seeking of as much extractive profit as possible.
There’s an endless supply of vulnerable individuals, Andrew went on, whether due to war, famine or climate change, or people just wanting to be better off economically; that traffickers prey on; and the traffickers have a business model. Andrew said: “to make this really uncomfortable for all of us, because it should be uncomfortable for all of us; to ask the question, who is responsible, I would say we are all responsible, and let me illustrate this; we are all sitting here wearing clothes, thank goodness, we have all consumed food today and we are able to communicate via consumer electronics; by doing noterhing other than those three things, you are connected to 40 to 60 slaves worldwide.”
Andrew’s point; even if you do not actively seek to gain from modern slavery, such basics as cheap mass market clothes, mobile phones (or their components) and picked vegetables and fruit have connections with exploited people; their labour touches all our lives. Some 230 years after slavery was abolished, we have all allowed slavery to come back, Andrew said.
The other invited speakers were Tony Dunkerley, Director of Illustro Consultancy Ltd; and a lawyer who has gone into academia, Lisa Hsin, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Modern Slavery Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She suggested that there’s a spectrum of offences; starting from the taking of a worker’s passport, and not allowing a worker to leave for a break, or requiring workers to wear nappies because they are not given time to go to the bathroom. The gravity of such exploitation can decrease or increase over a working week, making ‘modern slavery’ much more dynamic and insidious than we might think, she said. Andrew Wallis agreed that there’s a gradation of exploitation, of the commodification of human beings and denial of human rights. A line that’s crossed into modern slavery, he added, is if someone is not free to leave a workplace without reprisal (or fear of reprisal).
Staying with that question of who’s responsible, earlier Tony Dunkerley – formerly an anti-trafficking detective, these days a training and research consultant – began by suggesting it’s for governments, as states can do something about poverty, political instability, corruption, and a lack of human rights and education opportunities, among the things that may prompt people into trying to leave their home town or country in search of a better life, and be coerced or deceived by traffickers.
He went on to the ethical responsibility. The UK passed the Modern Slavery Act 2015; similar laws have been made in France, Australia, California and elsewhere, making ‘modern slavery’ a specific crime. In the UK and elsewhere, businesses are required to do human rights due diligence. However, comments among the online audience were that companies merely carry out what the 2015 Act requires, to place a statement on their website about what they do to see their supply chain is free of modern slavery (which does not actually require them legally to do anything about the actual slavery), and thereby are only paying the law lip-service.
Tony went on; if a supply chain for clothes or food may have slavery, is it the consumer’s responsibility?
The panel also considered law enforcement. One of the few hopeful signs was Tony’s reply to the question from the floor whether covid-19 has meant that modern slavery has slipped down the corporate agenda. Tony answered that as a ‘covid cop’ – someone who returned to police duty during the emergency of the first lockdown in the UK – one aspect of exploitation became very obvious; that of under-18s being used on ‘county lines’ drug dealing. To explain briefly; youths are used by drug dealers to carry drugs across county borders. During lockdown, when so few people were on the roads, streets and trains, such journeys were identified by police.
However, a point also made by Lisa Hsin; those drug mules, like trafficked Vietnamese workers caught on UK ‘cannabis farms’ may be arrested, charged and prosecuted; that is, treated by police and prosecutors as criminals, rather than victims of trafficking and debt bondage, or threats of violence against themselves and their families at home – Andrew Wallis pointing to that psychological control of victims, around the globe.
Auditing, Tony suggested, may be part of a solution; although as he added it does depend on how a supply chain is audited. If audit is something that happens once a year, and with a month’s notice given, things can be put in place to hide exploited workers’ conditions in a factory or supply chain. Andrew Wallis ended by saying that there has been some progress, but it’s slowing down. Prof Martin Gill as webinar chair made final remarks: “Clearly a major issue; signs of good practice, and hope; but lots more to do.” As he added, if a business is run with good crime prevention, that may mean good work against modern slavery also.
The next OSPAs
The next OSPAs (Outstanding Security Performance Awards) webinar is on Tuesday afternoon, about the impact of suicide: on colleagues, clients and society. Next Thursday’s is on the move to a ‘cashless society’. The 100th webinar by Prof Martin Gill, nearly a year since he began them during the first UK pandemic lockdown, is due on March 25; an interview with a career criminal fraudster. You can sign up to attend, or listen to past webinars for free at https://theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/.
Registry
Coincidentally, the Home Office has launched a modern slavery statement registry online, as a platform for organisations to share what they have done on the topic. A firm can add their statement on gov.uk.
