The business of modern-day slavery

Events last week in the UK, where three women were rescued from what appears to be a 30 year-long situation of forced domestic labour situation, have focused a great deal of attention on "modern-day slavery". But it is hardly a one-off. Issues of forced labour, human trafficking and modern slavery are increasingly gaining public attention. Business, however, has been slow to engage in the conversation.

Perhaps this is no surprise given that no company wants to run the risk of being tainted with the spectre of slavery. But most of the big modern slavery stories involve business. From children forced to harvest cotton in Uzbekistan to labourers enslaved to fish in the waters of New Zealand, hardly a week goes by without a new story of extreme exploitation being splashed across the media. The appalling treatment of migrant construction workers in Qatar the build up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup has gained more exposure than most, likely because of the headline claim that construction for the World Cup will leave 4000 migrant workers dead. It is a heart-stopping statistic.

With all this noise around modern slavery, much of it at the hands of campaigners such as Anti-Slavery International, Free the Slaves, and Walk Free (who are responsible for the recently launched Global Slavery Index), governments at least are gradually starting to act. The UK Government is already in the process of drafting a modern slavery bill to make the complex legal situation around the issue more clear for prosecutors. The US has also launched initiatives to tackle human trafficking in the supply chains of companies and government contractors. Canada too now has a national action plan to combat human trafficking whilst Brazil has perhaps gone the furthest of any country in seeking to tackle the problem.

Such measures are to be applauded, but there's still a long way to go in effectively combating the worst forms of human exploitation. And one crucial player that so far hasn't brought much to the party is business. Compared with many other social and environmental issues, modern slavery has not seen much enthusiastic response from the business community. Although virtually all corporate codes of conduct prohibit any kind of forced labour, the issue is rarely given any particular attention. Most businesses simply assume that it doesn't affect them. However, the torrent of news stories across various countries and industries suggests otherwise. Companies just aren't looking hard enough to find their connection to modern slavery.

David Arkless, formerly President of Corporate and Government Affairs at the global temp agency Manpower, is probably the most visible and articulate member of the business community involved in anti-slavery efforts. He said last week that he was "frustrated by the lack of involvement of corporations in efforts to ensure that their supply chains are verified against the use of abused labour and that most of the big corporations of the world have not amended both their financial, expense and human resource policies.” You can understand his frustration. Most business leaders are simply burying their heads in the sand.

This is a major stumbling block because most forms of modern slavery either involve business or affect it in some way. After all, forced labour is a particular way of doing business - a morally regnant one for sure, but a business practice all the same. Even illegal industries such as prostitution and drug cultivation, both of which have had numerous documented cases of trafficking and forced labour, rely on business principles and come into contact with legitimate businesses at some stage. The bottom line is that we have to understand modern slavery as a business if we are to make any real sense of it and take appropriate steps to prevent it.

The research base exploring the business of modern slavery is especially thin. So I was pleased last week to help launch a new report funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on the business models and supply chains found in forced labour in the UK. It was a fascinating project to be involved in, and along with my co-authors, I'm hoping that it really helps to shine a light on the economics of modern slavery in developed country contexts.

One of our main findings is that although forced labour is often described as a hidden crime, it is not as difficult to unearth as many in the UK, including businesses and government, seem to believe. As my co-author Genevieve LeBaron and I say in a recent article for The Guardian: "The problem is not so much that we cannot find forced labour; it is that either we choose not to look where it is most likely to occur or we simply misclassify those being exploited as criminals rather than victims. A new approach to detecting and enforcing forced labour is necessary. To pinpoint its occurrence we need to start by examining the forces of supply and demand."

Much still needs to be done to really understand how these economic forces lead to such extreme forms of exploitation. But the good news is that we're making good progress. The challenge will be getting legislators and business leaders alike to take our findings seriously.

AC


Photo by Junaidrao. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence

And the Oscar for best business ethics movie goes to....

Those of you that have noticed the "Ethics on Screen" feature in our business ethics book, or that have come across the film series, Doing the Business that we were involved in starting up at Nottingham, will be well aware of our interests in exploring corporate responsibility issues at the movies. With the awards season in full swing, and Oscar night less than a week away, we thought we would reflect on a few of the films that have been released in the last year that have addressed business ethics issues in one way or another. Here, for starters, are four of our favourites...

There Will Be Blood
First up, and top of many people's list come Oscar time, is this quirky epic about the early days of the oil industry in the US. Tracing the fortunes of the oil man Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis), the film provides a fascinating account of the emergent social compact wrangled out between industry and the local community. Day-Lewis plays a hard-grafting, hard bargaining, and ultimately hard headed prospector who pushes the ethical line in his somewhat underhand negotiations for drilling rights. But in an early manifestation of what some might recognise now as a shaky form of CSR, albeit of a decidely self-interested variety, Plainview's investment in the community sees one small town start to flourish as a result of its oil reserves, with a new church and other infrastructure coming to the once impoverished community. Most notable here is the battle between capitalism and religion that frames the film, as Plainview fights against the local preacher for power, control, and for the rich rewards from the precious resources that we are still fighting over today. In the end, it has to be said that the film's message, if it has one, about corporate responsibility is rather opaque. But there is lots of fun to be had poring over some of the allegories, especially at a time when companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell are breaking profitability records on both sides of the Atlantic, and when issues of oil, religion, and capitalism continue to dominate the debate about the war in Iraq.

Michael Clayton
Another Oscar nominated feature, this time staring George Clooney as a fixer in a corporate law firm. Here's what Warner Brothers say this one is about - as you can see, it is classic business ethics territory:

"...Michael Clayton is an in-house fixer at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York. A former criminal prosecutor, Clayton takes care of Kenner, Bach, & Ledeen's dirtiest work at the behest of the firm's co-founder, Marty Bach. Though burned out and hardly content with his job as a fixer, his divorce, a failed business venture, and mounting debt have left Clayton inextricably tied to the firm. At U/North, meanwhile, the career of litigator Karen Crowder rests on the multi-million dollar settlement of a class-action suit that Clayton's firm is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. But when Kenner Bach's brilliant and guilt-ridden attorney Arthur Edens sabotages the U/North case, Clayton faces the biggest challenge of his career and his life...."

Like many films before it, including movies such as The Insider, Boiler Room,and Glengarry Glen Ross, Michael Clayton is all about how our personal ethics intertwine with the harsh realities of corporate ethics, and the choices we sometimes have to make in navigating between them.

Up the Yangtze
When programming the 'Doing the Business' series, we always struggled to find good quality Asian movies that dealt seriously with business ethics issues. With rapid economic transformations in India, China, and elsewhere though, a number of excellent movies have started to come out that chart some of these developments. Up the Yangtze is one of these - a sharly observed documentary about a luxury tour boat on the famous Chinese river that provides us with a unique view of the massive Three Gorges megadam project. The film traces the experiences of one of the workers on the boat and her role in the Chinese 'economic miracle'. Assembling insights from villages flooded by the dam project, the burgeoning tourist trade, and the brash urban elite, the movies provides a kaleidescopic view of a country undergoing enormous social and economic transformation - and the ethical issues and problems that inevitably come in their wake.


It's a Free World
Many of Ken Loach's films have provided a harsh but realistic picture of those at the bottom of the economic pile - the immigrant cleaners (Bread and Roses), railworkers (The Navigators) and others that are invariably the losers in the casino of capitalism. His latest, It's a Free World, explores the underworld of migrant workers in London, and the firms that recruit them. It focuses on Angie, a hardworking and determined recruiter who has suffered some some of the injustices of the flexible labour market herself, and is now to prove a point by starting up on her own. As Loach's film production company, Sixteen Films, puts it:

"... Angie sets up a recruitment agency with her flat-mate Rose, working in a twilight zone between gangmasters, employment agencies and the migrant workers they place. This is a tale set against the reality of the Anglo Saxon miracle of flexible labour, globalisation, double shifts and lots of happy, happy, happy consumers: Us."

It is not, it has to be said, a happy film. But as a gritty, realistic, and clear sighted view of a slice of the labour market that most of us rarely catch much of a glimpse of, it is hard to beat.