tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/labour-exploitation-24839/articlesLabour exploitation – The Conversation2023-12-17T13:41:36Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2185752023-12-17T13:41:36Z2023-12-17T13:41:36ZBuying indie video games over the holidays can help make the industry more ethical and fair<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565328/original/file-20231212-17-944o3e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=770%2C73%2C4677%2C3276&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Big video game companies often time the release of their most popular titles around the holidays, and that means Christmas shoppers can make an impact by reflecting on the games they buy.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/buying-indie-video-games-over-the-holidays-can-help-make-the-industry-more-ethical-and-fair" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p><a href="https://thegameawards.com/">The 2023 Game Awards</a> recently saw accolades doled out to the biggest and most celebrated games of the year — <a href="https://thegameawards.com/nominees/best-independent-game">alongside a few lucky indie titles</a> — and with the holidays fast approaching, many of those same games are starting to go on sale. </p>
<p>Video game companies often time the release of their most popular titles for the holiday season. The biggest sales of the year happen between Black Friday and Christmas, and since publishers often push hard for new game releases in the last quarter of the year, now is the time to reflect on the political economy of video games and to think carefully about which games to buy and why. </p>
<p>This year has been a tough one for game developers, with <a href="https://www.polygon.com/23964448/video-game-industry-layoffs-crisis-2023">massive layoffs</a> resulting from financial mismanagement, overzealous and unsustainable investments and generally unethical business practices, thanks in part to the <a href="https://www.polygon.com/gaming/23538801/video-game-studio-union-microsoft-activision-blizzard">lack of unions</a> in the game industry.</p>
<p>The biggest cuts often happen in the largest, most successful companies — the ones releasing the big-name titles with massive player bases and raking in the profits. <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2023/the-state-of-video-games-big-releases-bigger-layoffs-and-an-imminent-crisis-point/">They boast about their sales, profits and record-breaking player bases</a> while laying off employees with little warning or explanation and inadequate severance.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565323/original/file-20231212-17-mwfdgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=25%2C19%2C4228%2C2812&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A young man sitting at a computer playing a video game." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565323/original/file-20231212-17-mwfdgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=25%2C19%2C4228%2C2812&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565323/original/file-20231212-17-mwfdgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565323/original/file-20231212-17-mwfdgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565323/original/file-20231212-17-mwfdgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565323/original/file-20231212-17-mwfdgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565323/original/file-20231212-17-mwfdgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565323/original/file-20231212-17-mwfdgg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Ethical gamers should consider the labour exploitation and discrimination in the industry when deciding which games they choose to buy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
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<p>Even <a href="https://www.polygon.com/23903033/bioware-severance-lawsuit-canada-dragon-age-dreadwolf">industry veterans are not immune</a> to sudden job loss, and <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/the-iatse-is-shining-a-light-on-the-video-game-industrys-lack-of-unions-with-a-new-survey">many game developers see their careers as unsustainable</a>. Similarly, it tends to be the biggest companies that push their <a href="https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501746536/a-precarious-game/#bookTabs=1">precarious developers</a> the hardest during this time of year as part of the notorious <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/10/video-game-workers-crunch-exploitation-union-organizing">“crunch culture”</a> of video games. These crunch periods see employees working ridiculously long hours and often <a href="https://www.gamesindustry.biz/everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-about-burnout">burning out</a> in an extreme push to get a game released in time for the fourth quarter sales boom, whether it’s actually ready for release or not. </p>
<p>Although many large studios are taking steps or at least starting to recognize these issues and address them, every year seems to bring a new issue, controversy or scandal to light. This year it’s been the massive layoffs, and I can only imagine what next year will bring. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.polygon.com/23485977/video-game-unions-guide-explainer">Labour exploitation and job precarity</a> have created an <a href="https://www.gameworkersunite.org/">ongoing push to unionize</a> game studios. But they are not the only problems plaguing the game industry.</p>
<h2>Discrimination in gaming</h2>
<p>Countless cases of <a href="https://magazine.swe.org/gaming-sidebar/">gender-</a> and <a href="https://www.gamesindustry.biz/lifting-the-barriers-for-black-professionals-in-the-games-industry">race-based</a> discrimination among game studios have come to light, including accusations of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/aug/08/activision-blizzard-lawsuit-women-sexual-harassment">sexual harassment and abuse</a>, in recent years. </p>
<p>For decades, critics have decried the lack of diversity among video game characters and the ongoing issue of stereotypical, problematic and harmful representation in games, especially when it comes to <a href="https://doi.org/10.17060/ijodaep.2023.n1.v1.2542">gender</a>, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/21/confronting-racial-bias-in-video-games/">race</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1123/jege.2022-0043">body size</a>. </p>
<p>This is tied to the fact that the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/08/24/leveling-up-the-gaming-gender-gap/">industry is dominated</a> by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/01/31/black-game-developers-diversity-push-is-lots-talk-little-progress/">white</a> <a href="https://igda-website.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/18113957/2021DSSFull.png">men</a> who seem to primarily make games for other white men. </p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/women-video-games-representation-e3/">only 18 per cent of games</a> showcased at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2020 featured a playable female protagonist. Even when women are present, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221095">men have twice as much in-game dialogue as women</a> (an issue that <a href="https://time.com/4837536/do-women-really-talk-more/">reflects real life</a>). This is despite the fact that roughly <a href="https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022-Essential-Facts-About-the-Video-Game-Industry.pdf">50 per cent of gamers are women</a>. In fact, in Canada, <a href="https://theesa.ca/resource/bringing-canadians-together-through-gaming-essential-facts-2022/">more women than men play games</a>. </p>
<p>Yet, this finger-wagging at the industry, for the most part, is directed at what we refer to as the “mainstream” — those corporate studios that produce the big blockbuster titles. </p>
<p>Although they receive considerably less attention at events like The Game Awards, and <a href="https://gamestudies.org/1601/articles/Gardagrabarczyk/">the definition of “independent” is a little murky</a>, smaller-scale games produced by indie studios might be a better option for consumers interested in more diverse and progressive content. </p>
<p>That’s not to mention their <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/indie-studios-accessible-game-design-tunic-coromon/">often more innovative and accessible gameplay</a> and lower time commitment than most big-name games. Independent game developers, while sharing <a href="https://www.thegamer.com/indie-developers-abuse/">some of the same issues as the mainstream industry</a>, might be the place to look when choosing to purchase games in a more conscientious, ethical way. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565327/original/file-20231212-30-r7dzkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman wearing headphones and holding a credit card looks at a computer screen" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565327/original/file-20231212-30-r7dzkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/565327/original/file-20231212-30-r7dzkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565327/original/file-20231212-30-r7dzkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565327/original/file-20231212-30-r7dzkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565327/original/file-20231212-30-r7dzkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565327/original/file-20231212-30-r7dzkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/565327/original/file-20231212-30-r7dzkd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Buying games made by smaller independent developers can help make the industry more equitable.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
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<h2>Supporting indie games</h2>
<p>Independent games tend to be made by smaller teams, and are often what might be considered “passion projects.” <a href="https://igda.org/resources-archive/developer-satisfaction-survey-summary-report-2021/">Over 40 per cent of indie developers forego a salary</a> to bring their game to production, and indie studios are often <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851081">mired in precarity</a> and are more likely to be deeply impacted by game sales — one bad flop could shutter an indie studio. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, mainstream games carry far more weight than independent games do, with much higher sales and far more aggressive marketing campaigns. This means that mainstream games have a far greater cultural impact and continue to be the driving force behind the medium as a whole. </p>
<p>It also means that it’s harder for most consumers to find new, more innovative and diverse games to play. While delightful indie games like <a href="https://www.cocoongame.com/">COCOON</a> or <a href="https://seaofstarsgame.co/">Sea of Stars</a> may shine at The Game Awards, the hundreds, if not thousands, of other beautiful interactive experiences produced each year largely go unnoticed by mainstream media and risk being passed over by consumers. </p>
<p>Gamers should support smaller-scale creators, especially those just starting out, risking it all to bring their artistic vision to life and standing out when it comes to supporting their own and their employees’ well-being. It’s an important and ethical thing to do. </p>
<p>If it means giving less money to large corporations that have shown all they care about is profit, then that’s an added bonus. I’m not advocating for boycotting the biggest hits of the year, but I am encouraging consumers to check out the indie scene as well.</p>
<p>Games hosted privately on sites like <a href="https://itch.io/">itch.io</a> are a great option, as developers receive the majority, if not all, of the profit from sales and you can even give a little extra money to support them if you’d like. </p>
<p>Or, for anyone who needs a little extra guidance, <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/">Humble Bundle</a> curates huge collections of games around specific genres or themes — many of which are indie — and offers them at a very low price while also <a href="https://www.humblebundle.com/charities">raising money for charity</a> and <a href="https://blackgamedevfund.com/">supporting Black game developers</a>. </p>
<p>Developers, critics and scholars tirelessly advocate for and work toward positive change within the game industry, and consumers can help by thinking about the games they buy.</p>
<p>It takes a little research, but by not buying games made under crunch conditions by companies that don’t care about diversity and don’t protect their employees, and instead buying smaller independent games that support emerging and diverse developers, consumers can make a big difference and help push the industry in more ethical directions.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218575/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sarah Stang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Video game companies often time the release of their most popular titles for the holiday season. Now is the time to reflect on the political economy of video games and which games we buy.Sarah Stang, Assistant Professor, Department of Digital Humanities, Brock UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2149522023-10-05T18:00:39Z2023-10-05T18:00:39ZRecord immigration will put pressure on NZ’s population, infrastructure and productivity – where’s the election debate?<p>The concerns of various pundits and politicians earlier this year that New Zealand might <a href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/brain-drain-signs-of-recovery-but-immigration-challenges-remain/62XKIY5H6JPXAPF6YKBSWMBTQA/">struggle to attract immigrants</a> turned out to be premature. In fact, the country’s population has been boosted to the extent it should be a bigger election issue than it is.</p>
<p>In the 12 months to July, total permanent migrant arrivals were 208,400 – exceeding previous levels by quite a margin. Accounting for permanent departures, the net population gain from immigrants has been 96,200. </p>
<p>That breaks all previous records, and even accounts for a return to the consistent pattern of a net loss of New Zealand citizens (39,500 in the same period). There is every indication the country will hit an <a href="https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/international-migration-july-2023/">annual net gain</a> of 100,000 people.</p>
<p>At this rate, inward migration will provide a net annual population gain of 2% for 2023. Once natural increase is added (births over deaths being more than 20,000 a year), the overall rate will be around 2.3% to 2.4%. By contrast, the OECD average is less than 0.5%.</p>
<p>Auckland is beginning another period of rapid population growth, reversing the <a href="https://www.stats.govt.nz/news/aucklands-population-falls-for-the-first-time">decline seen in 2021</a>. The city’s growth accounts for around half of the country’s total net migration gain. Combined with a natural increase of around 7,000 to 8,000, it means the city will have significant population growth, even allowing for a net migration <a href="https://www.infometrics.co.nz/article/2020-11-kiwis-shifting-from-cities-to-the-regions">loss to other regions</a>.</p>
<p>Some of this surge can be explained by the return to relative normal after pandemic restrictions were lifted. But there’s a range of other factors pushing people to New Zealand, including anti-immigrant politics and general disenchantment in other countries.</p>
<p>New Zealand is seen as a desirable destination. In a <a href="https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2023-09-07/the-best-countries-in-the-world-according-to-americans">recent US survey</a> Americans ranked New Zealand second on their list of “best countries” – ahead of the US itself.</p>
<h2>Immigration and productivity</h2>
<p>In 2021, at the request of the finance minister, the Productivity Commission examined the ways immigration settings would contribute to the “long-term prosperity and wellbeing” of the country.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.productivity.govt.nz/assets/Inquiries/immigration-settings/Immigration-Fit-for-the-future.pdf">Immigration – Fit for the Future</a> report released in 2022 provided a very complete review of the data and issues. While it indicated that immigration and immigrants have positive effects and outcomes for New Zealand, it also pointed to a lack of consistency and strategy, and little public accountability.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/refugees-who-set-up-businesses-enrich-nz-financially-culturally-and-socially-they-deserve-more-support-194446">Refugees who set up businesses enrich NZ financially, culturally and socially – they deserve more support</a>
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</em>
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<p>Key findings included what the commission referred to as “an infrastructure deficit” as investment failed to keep up with population growth. It also described a “reliance risk” on migrant labour that had “negative consequences on innovation and productivity”. </p>
<p>In the trade-off between a reliance on migrant labour or investing in new technologies, the concern is that migrant labour presents an easy win, with little incentive for employers to innovate. </p>
<p>Yet the significant implications of the current immigration surge for planning and productivity are noticeably absent from this election campaign.</p>
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<h2>The missing election issue</h2>
<p>Mostly, the main parties are positive about the role and contribution of immigrants (unlike some countries where anti-migrant sentiment has been rising). But the parties are also mainly concerned with policy detail, not the bigger picture.</p>
<p>Labour, National, ACT and the Greens all propose family and parent visas. This is to be welcomed, as migration works best when extended families are involved. And there is a general recognition that talent recruitment needs more attention.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-has-new-zealand-welcomed-ukrainians-fleeing-war-and-not-others-trying-to-do-the-same-179467">Why has New Zealand welcomed Ukrainians fleeing war and not others trying to do the same?</a>
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<p>Specifically, Labour wants Pasifika and other migrants who have been in New Zealand for ten years or more to gain residency. The Greens propose a review of refugee and asylum-seeker policy. National wants a new visa category for highly educated migrants. And ACT would require a regulatory impact analysis for all immigration policy.</p>
<p>For its part, New Zealand First refers back to its policies from the 2020 election. This includes statements about the negative impact of “cheap labour undermining New Zealand’s pay and conditions”, something the Productivity Commission found little evidence of.</p>
<p>But the party also suggested greater attention should be given to a more regionally dispersed population and the establishment of a 30-year population plan. Somewhat by default, then, New Zealand First highlights the gaps in other parties’ policy recommendations.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/foreign-policy-has-been-missing-from-nzs-election-campaign-voters-deserve-answers-to-these-big-questions-214633">Foreign policy has been missing from NZ's election campaign – voters deserve answers to these big questions</a>
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<h2>Where is the population strategy?</h2>
<p>A more robust and constructive election debate would have addressed those big gaps more directly.</p>
<p>What should be New Zealand’s annual target for migrants, both permanent and temporary? How do we meet the challenges created by the current high volume, including the processing of applications, potential for migrant exploitation, and the stress on services and infrastructure?</p>
<p>More broadly, shouldn’t we be looking at immigration policy in the context of all the elements in play? This would mean factoring in the rapid ageing of the population, declining fertility and very different regional demographic trajectories (with some places experiencing population stagnation or decline).</p>
<p>Asked in a <a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2018909344/election-2023-national-leader-christopher-luxon">recent radio interview</a> about the housing and infrastructure challenges of immigration and record population growth, National leader (and potentially next prime minister) Christopher Luxon argued the numbers were a “catch-up” from the COVID years:</p>
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<p>We’ve got to make sure immigration is always strongly linked to our economic agenda and where we have worker shortages.</p>
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<p>This only emphasises the lack of a genuine national plan. Now that the workers kept out by COVID are flowing into the country in large numbers, the Productivity Commission’s observations and suggestions are more relevant than ever.</p>
<p>Otherwise, New Zealand risks allowing immigration to be the default answer to much harder questions about innovation, productivity and the development of a long-term population strategy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214952/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Spoonley has received funding from MBIE to research migrant flows and the impacts of diversity. This research ended in 2021. </span></em></p>With immigration soaring, warnings about its impact on population distribution, housing and business innovation have gone largely undiscussed during the election campaign.Paul Spoonley, Distinguished Professor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Massey UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2116582023-08-18T12:39:09Z2023-08-18T12:39:09ZChatGPT and other language AIs are nothing without humans – a sociologist explains how countless hidden people make the magic<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/544088/original/file-20230822-21-76763r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C898%2C532&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Do you know who helped ChatGPT give you that clever answer?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2016850637/">Eric Smalley, The Conversation US (composite derived from Library of Congress image)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The media frenzy surrounding ChatGPT and other large language model artificial intelligence systems spans a range of themes, from the prosaic – <a href="https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-search-with-a-new-ai-powered-microsoft-bing-and-edge-your-copilot-for-the-web/">large language models could replace conventional web search</a> – to the concerning – AI will eliminate many jobs – and the overwrought – AI poses an extinction-level threat to humanity. All of these themes have a common denominator: large language models herald artificial intelligence that will supersede humanity.</p>
<p>But large language models, for all their complexity, are actually really dumb. And despite the name “artificial intelligence,” they’re completely dependent on human knowledge and labor. They can’t reliably generate new knowledge, of course, but there’s more to it than that. </p>
<p>ChatGPT can’t learn, improve or even stay up to date without humans giving it new content and telling it how to interpret that content, not to mention programming the model and building, maintaining and powering its hardware. To understand why, you first have to understand how ChatGPT and similar models work, and the role humans play in making them work.</p>
<h2>How ChatGPT works</h2>
<p>Large language models like ChatGPT work, broadly, by <a href="https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/">predicting what characters, words and sentences</a> should follow one another in sequence based on training data sets. In the case of ChatGPT, the training data set contains immense quantities of public text scraped from the internet. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">ChatGPT works by statistics, not by understanding words.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Imagine I trained a language model on the following set of sentences:</p>
<p>Bears are large, furry animals.
Bears have claws.
Bears are secretly robots.
Bears have noses.
Bears are secretly robots.
Bears sometimes eat fish.
Bears are secretly robots.</p>
<p>The model would be more inclined to tell me that bears are secretly robots than anything else, because that sequence of words appears most frequently in its training data set. This is obviously a problem for models trained on fallible and inconsistent data sets – which is all of them, even academic literature. </p>
<p>People write lots of different things about quantum physics, Joe Biden, healthy eating or the Jan. 6 insurrection, some more valid than others. How is the model supposed to know what to say about something, when people say lots of different things?</p>
<h2>The need for feedback</h2>
<p>This is where feedback comes in. If you use ChatGPT, you’ll notice that you have the option to rate responses as good or bad. If you rate them as bad, you’ll be asked to provide an example of what a good answer would contain. ChatGPT and other large language models learn what answers, what predicted sequences of text, are good and bad through feedback from users, the development team and contractors hired to label the output.</p>
<p>ChatGPT cannot compare, analyze or evaluate arguments or information on its own. It can only generate sequences of text similar to those that other people have used when comparing, analyzing or evaluating, preferring ones similar to those it has been told are good answers in the past.</p>
<p>Thus, when the model gives you a good answer, it’s drawing on a large amount of human labor that’s already gone into telling it what is and isn’t a good answer. There are many, many human workers hidden behind the screen, and they will always be needed if the model is to continue improving or to expand its content coverage. </p>
<p>A recent investigation published by journalists in Time magazine revealed that <a href="https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/">hundreds of Kenyan workers spent thousands of hours</a> reading and labeling racist, sexist and disturbing writing, including graphic descriptions of sexual violence, from the darkest depths of the internet to teach ChatGPT not to copy such content. They were paid no more than US$2 an hour, and many understandably reported experiencing psychological distress due to this work.</p>
<figure>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Language AIs require humans to tell them what makes a good answer – and what makes toxic content.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What ChatGPT can’t do</h2>
<p>The importance of feedback can be seen directly in ChatGPT’s tendency to “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/3571730">hallucinate</a>”; that is, confidently provide inaccurate answers. ChatGPT can’t give good answers on a topic without training, even if good information about that topic is widely available on the internet. You can try this out yourself by asking ChatGPT about more and less obscure things. I’ve found it particularly effective to ask ChatGPT to summarize the plots of different fictional works because, it seems, the model has been more rigorously trained on nonfiction than fiction. </p>
<p>In my own testing, ChatGPT summarized the plot of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “<a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-lord-of-the-rings-jrr-tolkien?variant=39999349817378">The Lord of the Rings</a>,” a very famous novel, with only a few mistakes. But its summaries of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “<a href="https://www.eno.org/operas/the-pirates-of-penzance/">The Pirates of Penzance</a>” and of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/538943/the-left-hand-of-darkness-by-ursula-k-le-guin/9780143111597">The Left Hand of Darkness</a>” – both slightly more niche but far from obscure – come close to playing <a href="https://www.madlibs.com/">Mad Libs</a> with the character and place names. It doesn’t matter how good these works’ respective Wikipedia pages are. The model needs feedback, not just content.</p>
<p>Because large language models don’t actually understand or evaluate information, they depend on humans to do it for them. They are parasitic on human knowledge and labor. When new sources are added into their training data sets, they need new training on whether and how to build sentences based on those sources. </p>
<p>They can’t evaluate whether news reports are accurate or not. They can’t assess arguments or weigh trade-offs. They can’t even read an encyclopedia page and only make statements consistent with it, or accurately summarize the plot of a movie. They rely on human beings to do all these things for them. </p>
<p>Then they paraphrase and remix what humans have said, and rely on yet more human beings to tell them whether they’ve paraphrased and remixed well. If the common wisdom on some topic changes – for example, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehaa586">whether salt</a> is <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s13668-021-00383-z">bad for your heart</a> or <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/ijc.32211">whether early breast cancer screenings are useful</a> – they will need to be extensively retrained to incorporate the new consensus.</p>
<h2>Many people behind the curtain</h2>
<p>In short, far from being the harbingers of totally independent AI, large language models illustrate the total dependence of many AI systems, not only on their designers and maintainers but on their users. So if ChatGPT gives you a good or useful answer about something, remember to thank the thousands or millions of hidden people who wrote the words it crunched and who taught it what were good and bad answers. </p>
<p>Far from being an autonomous superintelligence, ChatGPT is, like all technologies, nothing without us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211658/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John P. Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Language model AIs seem smart because of how they string words together, but in reality they can’t do anything without many people guiding them every step of the way.John P. Nelson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Ethics and Societal Implications of Artificial Intelligence, Georgia Institute of TechnologyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2016802023-04-13T12:31:00Z2023-04-13T12:31:00ZFairtrade: study finds premium label does not always benefit workers on South African wine farms<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/518701/original/file-20230331-24-bbmx2i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Wine was first produced in South Africa <a href="https://www.wosa.us/wines/history/">as far back as the mid-1600s</a> by Dutch colonisers who sold it to passing ships. The industry developed further during the colonial and apartheid eras and wine became an important part of the South African economy.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616688.2017.1298152">recent study</a> reports that the industry now employs close to 300,000 people. A <a href="https://news.wine.co.za/news.aspx?NEWSID=38772">2021 report</a> indicates that it generates R10 billion (more than US$550 million) in export value annually. While wine does not rank as one of South Africa’s biggest industries, it <a href="http://www.sawis.co.za/info/download/Macro-economic_Impact_of_the_Wine_Industry_2019_Final_(2).pdf#page=7">contributes 1.1% to South Africa’s GDP and 1.6% of the country’s total employment</a>, making it significant to the economy.</p>
<p>During the colonial and apartheid eras, the country’s wine industry was characterised by the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057070.2016.1234120">use of enslaved workers</a> and the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637348">exploitation and paternalistic control of black and coloured labourers by white farmers</a>. The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Coloured">black and coloured</a> labourers lived and worked on the farms under the control of the white farmers. </p>
<p>With the formal end of apartheid in 1994, such relations were expected to change. <a href="https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---africa/documents/publication/wcms_385959.pdf">New labour laws</a> to protect workers from exploitation were introduced. However, many observers <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747730802057753">continued to have concerns</a> about the living and working conditions of workers on the wine farms.</p>
<h2>Fairtrade certification</h2>
<p>In response to these concerns, some South African wine farms applied for and were granted Fairtrade certification. <a href="https://www.fairtrade.net/">The Fairtrade label</a> assures consumers that the product they buy has been ethically sourced and traded. <a href="https://www.fairtrade.net/about/certification">Fairtrade certification</a> is supposed to be given only after an audit to determine that the social, economic and environmental conditions on the farm meet certain minimum requirements. </p>
<p>Fairtrade products, such as Fairtrade coffee, chocolate or wine, are sold at a higher price, with a percentage of the sale value going towards a <a href="https://www.fairtrade.net/impact/fairtrade-premium-overview">Fairtrade premium</a>. This premium is supposed to be spent on projects that will improve farmworkers’ lives, such as creches, literacy programmes or medical centres.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-efforts-by-cote-divoire-and-ghana-to-help-cocoa-farmers-havent-worked-162845">Why efforts by Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana to help cocoa farmers haven’t worked</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>If Fairtrade certification worked as intended for the South African wine industry, it could offer local producers improved entry into new markets while also supporting farmworkers’ developmental needs. </p>
<p>But what is the reality? </p>
<p>That’s what we set out to establish in a <a href="http://vital.seals.ac.za:8080/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:61086?site_name=GlobalView">doctoral study</a>. What makes this study important is that it focuses on the experiences of farmworkers on commercial wine farms. Most Fairtrade products are produced by small-scale producers who are organised into cooperatives. However, in the case of South African Fairtrade wine, it is mostly commercial farms which have been certified. </p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Fair-Trade-The-Challenges-of-Transforming-Globalization/Raynolds-Murray-Wilkinson/p/book/9780415772037">other researchers have pointed out</a>, the decision to extend Fairtrade certification to South African commercial wine farmers has been a controversial one. Such farmers, who are mostly wealthy and white, are not the typical producers associated with Fairtrade certification. </p>
<p>Our study can help in reviewing whether the inclusion of such farmers is justified.</p>
<p>As part of the study, interviews were conducted in 2020 with representatives of the <a href="https://saftu.org.za/csaawu/">Commercial, Stevedoring, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union</a>, other key stakeholders in the wine industry, and workers on five Fairtrade farms. </p>
<p>The five farms are all commercial farms and all hold Fairtrade certification. But the experiences of the farmworkers suggest that while the wine bottles leaving the farm might bear the Fairtrade label, the workers on these farms do not feel they are fairly treated. These findings cast doubt on the efficacy and legitimacy of extending Fairtrade certification to South African commercial wine farmers. </p>
<p>Fairtrade’s <a href="https://www.fairtrade.net/about/mission">stated mission</a> is</p>
<blockquote>
<p>is to connect disadvantaged producers and consumers, promote fairer trading conditions and empower producers to combat poverty, strengthen their position and take more control over their lives. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Our study suggests that this mission is not being realised on South African Fairtrade wine farms. Workers on these farms are not being empowered to combat poverty and have more control over their lives. </p>
<h2>What farmworkers said</h2>
<p>Most of the 30 farmworkers interviewed were not even aware that the farm they worked on was Fairtrade certified. Only one had a good understanding of what the Fairtrade certification and audit process entails, but her account suggests that the process did not function as it should: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>{W}hen they do audits, the employer will clean. … {P}eople are forced to clean so that if the auditor comes, they will find everything in good standard. What happens when the auditor comes is that the employer chooses who must talk to the auditor because, for example, me, I will never be called to an auditor because they know that I will tell the honest truth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Regular audits are meant to be conducted as part of the certification process to ensure that farmworkers on Fairtrade farms are fairly treated and adequately paid.</p>
<p>Farmworkers reported poor and unsafe living and working conditions. One woman complained:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What happens in the vineyards is that there is no toilet for us as women. We have to relieve ourselves in the vineyards. The toilets you will see when there is an audit.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Others described inadequate housing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We were promised that these houses would be temporary. It is cold and when it rains the rain comes in. … We have reported this, and nothing happens. I have to constantly move my bed when it rains because the water comes through. I have been here since 1979. They [farm management] have ignored me. They don’t care.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Farmworkers also spoke about increased labour casualisation, especially for women. They further reported being intimidated for taking part in trade union activities, or for speaking out about their conditions. It was clear that, contrary to the <a href="https://www.fairtrade.net/about/mission">stated goals of Fairtrade International</a>, farmworkers on these farms did not feel empowered.</p>
<h2>What needs to happen</h2>
<p>Fairtrade certification may be helping farmers gain entry to international markets, but our study suggests it is not bringing the anticipated benefits to farmworkers. </p>
<p>Significant changes to the auditing and certification processes need to be made if the certification is to benefit workers on South African wine farms. More transparent and rigorous auditing needs to occur if certification is to be meaningful.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/201680/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua Bell received funding from the NRF-DAAD for the purposes of this study. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally Matthews does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Most farmworkers were not even aware that the farm they worked on was Fairtrade certified.Sally Matthews, Associate Professor of Political and International Studies, Rhodes UniversityJoshua Bell, PhD Candidate in the Department of Political and International Studies, Rhodes University, Rhodes UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1929442022-11-23T19:12:23Z2022-11-23T19:12:23ZWe know sweatshop clothing is bad – and buy it anyway. Here’s how your brain makes excuses<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496907/original/file-20221123-13-l30f2x.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3959%2C2976&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>You face a dilemma. You’ve found the perfect shirt, and it’s an absolute bargain, but you notice it’s “Made in Bangladesh”. You’re conscious it was probably made using cheap labour. Do you buy it, or walk away? </p>
<p>Today Oxfam released its annual <a href="https://www.oxfam.org.au/what-she-makes/naughty-or-nice-2022/">Naughty or Nice</a> list. This list highlights retail brands committed to transparent sourcing, separating labour costs in price negations, and conducting a wage gap analysis to work towards paying workers a living wage.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496939/original/file-20221123-22-9nzv15.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496939/original/file-20221123-22-9nzv15.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496939/original/file-20221123-22-9nzv15.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496939/original/file-20221123-22-9nzv15.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496939/original/file-20221123-22-9nzv15.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496939/original/file-20221123-22-9nzv15.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496939/original/file-20221123-22-9nzv15.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/496939/original/file-20221123-22-9nzv15.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=942&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Oxfam’s 2022 Naughty or Nice list.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Oxfam</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This list is one of several resources trying to encourage ethical consumption. Yet despite concerns of sweatshop labour, and consumers claiming they’re <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-10-2976-9_5">willing to pay more</a> for ethically-sourced clothes, there remains high demand for ultra-low-price mass-produced clothing.</p>
<p>The explanation lies in a psychological phenomenon called <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/motivated-reasoning">motivated reasoning</a>. It explains how people convince themselves sweatshop labour is actually okay, as long as the product is desirable.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/brands-are-leaning-on-recycled-clothes-to-meet-sustainability-goals-how-are-they-made-and-why-is-recycling-them-further-so-hard-184406">Brands are leaning on 'recycled' clothes to meet sustainability goals. How are they made? And why is recycling them further so hard?</a>
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<h2>The many costs of low-priced apparel</h2>
<p>Consumption is an individualistic act. It allows us to distinguish ourselves through our clothing, culture, and even the entertainment we consume. <a href="https://www.cairn.info/revue-rimhe-2016-5-page-45.htm">Ethical consumption</a> is when consumers consider the wider environmental and societal impacts of what they consume, including <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0267257X.2012.659280">when they purchase clothing</a>.</p>
<p>Revenue from the global apparel market is expected to reach <a href="https://www.statista.com/topics/5091/apparel-market-worldwide/#topicHeader__wrapper">US$2 trillion</a> (about A$3 trillion) by 2026. Asia remains the garment factory of the world. It accounts for 55% of global textiles and clothing exports, and employs some <a href="https://www.ilo.org/asia/media-centre/news/WCMS_848238/lang--en/index.htm">60 million workers</a>. </p>
<p>And the International Labour Organisation has estimated <a href="https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_norm/---ipec/documents/publication/wcms_797515.pdf">160 million children</a> aged 5 to 17 were engaged in child labour at the beginning of 2020 – many of whom would have worked in the fashion supply chain.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/odnUdaAN9SE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Oxfam’s What She Makes campaign is demanding that big brands pay a living wage to the women who make our clothes.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Isn’t any job better than no job?</h2>
<p>A common defence by manufacturers that use exploitative labour arrangements is that such work is often <a href="https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=csspe">the best option available</a> for those workers. Workers voluntarily accept the conditions, and their employment helps with <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12122-006-1006-z">long-term economic development</a>. </p>
<p>At the same time, emerging research argues sweatshops are the <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0950017020926372">result of consumer choice</a>, wherein retailers are simply responding to a demand for ultra-low-price fashion. This infers that if there was no demand, there would be no sweatshops.</p>
<p>But one problem with holding consumers responsible is that the vast majority aren’t aware of how their clothes are made. Despite “supply chain transparency” being credited for increasing <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cb.1852">brand legitimacy and trust</a>, true transparency is <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10304312.2021.1993575?scroll=top&needAccess=true">difficult to attain</a>, even for retailers, due to the disjointed and <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/03/18/why-fashion-supply-chain-traceability-is-a-tech-challenge-that-begins-with-ai/?sh=362e093d5f6d">distant elements</a> of how products move through the supply chain (which includes suppliers, producers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers).</p>
<p>Our own <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JFMM-06-2021-0158/full/html">research</a> into consumers’ perception of worker welfare found people struggle to connect the $5 shirt they bought with the person who made it, or how it was made.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-can-only-do-so-much-we-asked-fast-fashion-shoppers-how-ethical-concerns-shape-their-choices-172978">'I can only do so much': we asked fast-fashion shoppers how ethical concerns shape their choices</a>
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<h2>Motivated reasoning</h2>
<p>Oxfam’s Naughty or Nice list aims to name (and essentially shame) retail brands that fail to disclose which factories they source product from, and how they manage sourcing integrity. The logic is that if consumers are aware of which brands disclose their ethical sourcing strategies, then they’ll make more informed purchase decisions. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Our brains are wired to arrive at conclusions we prefer, as long as we maintain an <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/1991-06436-001.pdf?auth_token=dfa958470d287abcbf517c0362958f295e8fff44">illusion of objectivity</a>. And we do this even when the evidence is contrary to our beliefs.</p>
<p>A person can consider themselves an ethical consumer (which forms part of their “<a href="https://positivepsychology.com/self-concept/">self-concept</a>”) and still buy a $5 shirt, though they suspect it may have been made in a sweatshop. They may tell themselves “any job is better than no job” for workers, or “money saved today is money to spend on the children tomorrow”. In doing so they convince themselves they have objectively considered the purchase.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1509/jmkr.45.6.633">theory of self-concept</a> explains how consumers can justify the “ethical burden” away. It also suggests people use higher-order thinking to rationalise and <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_3">justify personal transgressions</a>.</p>
<p>Most of us are so distant from supply chain exploitation, and so hooked on scoring a bargain, that seeing a list of “naughty” retail brands won’t change our behaviour. </p>
<h2>Evidence of motivated reasoning</h2>
<p>Researchers have studied how we use motivated reasoning to arrive at <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749597813000149">more preferable outcomes</a> that help protect our self-concept.</p>
<p>In one experiment they examined whether participants would use economic justifications (such as “any job is better than no job”) to book a Caribbean holiday at a resort associated with questionable labour practices. They found participants were likely to rationalise their choice and take the holiday despite claims of exploitative working conditions. </p>
<p>In a second study they explored the link between justifications for sweatshop labour and product desirability. As predicted, economic justifications were higher for highly desirable sweatshop-made shoes. Other studies have found motivated reasoning being employed to justify <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167299025001003">keeping overpayments</a> and <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-017-3698-9">self-allocating annual bonuses</a>, among <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17524032.2014.932817">other examples</a>. </p>
<h2>How can you shop more ethically?</h2>
<p>The bottom line is ethical consumption must be internally motivated. The good news is once you have this motivation, there are a number of resources to help you. </p>
<p><strong>Knowledge is power</strong></p>
<p>Oxfam’s Naughty or Nice report, Clean Clothes’ <a href="https://cleanclothes.org/campaigns/the-accord/brand-tracker">Brand Tracker</a>, <a href="https://www.fairwear.org/">Fair Wear</a>, <a href="https://goodonyou.eco/about/">Good On You</a>, and Fashion Revolution’s <a href="https://www.fashionrevolution.org/about/transparency/">Fashion Transparency Index</a> are all great resources to identify which brands disclose their social policies, practices, and impacts in their operations and supply chain. </p>
<p><strong>Brand accreditations</strong></p>
<p>Most brands will disclose if they have their ethical credentials certified by organisations such as <a href="https://ethicalclothingaustralia.org.au/about/">Ethical Clothing Australia</a>, <a href="https://www.wrapcompliance.org/">WRAP</a> or <a href="https://www.fairtrade.net/about/certification">Fairtrade International</a>. These <a href="https://ethicalclothingaustralia.org.au/steps-to-accreditation/">accreditations</a> generally involve a rigorous process of independent eligibility tests, compliance with guidelines and external annual audits. </p>
<p><strong>Self-reporting</strong></p>
<p>Many leading brands provide their policies on ethical sourcing and slave labour online (see <a href="https://www.kmart.com.au/modernslavery/">Kmart and Target</a> and <a href="https://www.wesfarmers.com.au/docs/default-source/sustainability/sustainability-documents/2108261641-wesfarmers-approach-to-human-rights.pdf?sfvrsn=237912bb_20#xd_co_f=ODY2ZWYyMGYtMDY4My00ZmQ1LTg4NmEtNjBjOTM0YmFhM2Nm%7E">Wesfarmers</a>). Make sure the claims are made in accordance with reporting requirements from <a href="https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/criminal-justice/Pages/modern-slavery.aspx">Australia’s Modern Slavery Act 2018</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/modern-slavery-how-consumers-can-make-a-difference-163603">Modern slavery: how consumers can make a difference</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/192944/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A psychological mechanism called ‘motivated reasoning’ helps us justify the ethical burden away.Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of TechnologyLouise Grimmer, Senior Lecturer in Retail Marketing, University of TasmaniaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1910202022-10-04T15:46:12Z2022-10-04T15:46:12ZBlaming poor labour conditions in Ghana’s transport sector on ride-hailing companies misses the deeper issues<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486496/original/file-20220926-24-205g44.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ride hailing companies have found success in the transport sector in Ghana.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">G.KBediako/Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft have become ubiquitous in many parts of the world over the past decade. <a href="https://www.lltjournal.ca/index.php/llt/article/view/6075/7028">Criticism of their business model</a> has also become commonplace: ride-hailing companies are frequently accused of destroying traditional taxi businesses, undermining wages, and creating the digital <a href="https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/100073.pdf">equivalent of sweatshops</a>.</p>
<p>Though many of the complaints have emanated from <a href="https://www.lltjournal.ca/index.php/llt/article/view/6075/7028">wealthier countries</a> in the West, there are growing concerns that such companies’ African operations are not above reproach. From Abuja to Cape Town, Cairo to Nairobi, <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2018/04/what-is-uber-up-to-in-africa">researchers are documenting</a> the precarious conditions in which drivers operate.</p>
<p>In our <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01258-6">recent paper</a>, we examined the situation in Ghana. We interviewed drivers, riders, car owners and other scholars who are researching Ghana’s ride-hailing industry. </p>
<p>We found that the popular narrative of blaming the industry’s precarious labour conditions on ride-hailing companies is problematic. It deflects attention from the structural enablers of the conditions (which predate the companies), while fomenting life-threatening hatred for the drivers who work with them. </p>
<p>Our analysis draws attention to the need to address the broader societal influences of labour exploitation in Ghana’s urban transport sector. These include the inadequate prioritisation of the creation of adequate, secure jobs and strong labour protections.</p>
<h2>It’s no joyride</h2>
<p>Some ride-hailing drivers own their cars. But the majority operate under either <em>‘sales’</em> or <em>‘work and pay’</em> contracts. Drivers employed under sales contracts operate their cars as a sort of franchise and pay a daily or weekly fee to the owners. </p>
<p>They also have to foot daily operational expenses including companies’ commissions; the cost of fuel, internet and sometimes maintenance. The drivers’ take home is what remains after deducting the sales and operational costs. </p>
<p>Under the work and pay contract system, however, the driver operates the car and pays the owner a weekly or monthly sum up to a pre-agreed vehicle value, after which ownership of the vehicle transfers to the driver. </p>
<p>Car owners, under both sales and work and pay contract systems, normally demand weekly returns of GH¢ 400–500 from drivers. These arrangements did not arrive with the emerging of the ride-hailing industry; they have long existed in the traditional taxi business and are merely being copied by the industry’s players.</p>
<p>Unlike tro-tro (minibus) and taxi drivers, ride-hailing drivers serve two masters: the company and the car owners. This doubles their financial obligations and contributes to tremendous financial precarity, which seeps into the rest of their lives. They work long hours and sometimes sleep in their cars. One driver in Accra told us that some of his colleagues:</p>
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<p>…don’t even go home; they have their toothbrushes, sponge, and towel in their cars. They drive from morning to evening, park at filling stations, take a nap, take a bath and continue driving.</p>
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<p>These experiences may suggest that ride-hailing activities are creating shaky labour conditions. However, as we have <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-fines-and-jail-time-wont-change-the-behaviour-of-ghanas-minibus-drivers-155379">extensively documented elsewhere</a>, the tro-tro and shared taxi drivers who dominate Ghana’s urban public transport sector operate under similar conditions.</p>
<p>The fact that both traditional and ride-hailing company drivers face similar precarious conditions suggests that the roots of the labour issues in Ghana’s urban transport sector go deeper. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-fines-and-jail-time-wont-change-the-behaviour-of-ghanas-minibus-drivers-155379">Why fines and jail time won't change the behaviour of Ghana's minibus drivers</a>
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<h2>Tracing the roots of the problem</h2>
<p>Most people walk a great deal to access work and services in <a href="http://airqualityandmobility.org/STR/NMTStrategy_Ghana_200402.pdf">Ghana’s cities</a>. For longer distances, however, they rely on the ubiquitous tro-tros, shared taxis and, in recent times, <em>Okada</em> (motorcycles).</p>
<p>While being <em>‘popular’</em> in the sense that they are widely used, these privately-run transport modes remain marginal in terms of public support and investment. The operators are highly fragmented, and financial capital is thus dispersed. </p>
<p>Their business perspective largely focuses on individual short-term profits, which are also generally low. These conditions undermine a deeper focus on investing in vehicle maintenance/replacement or digital innovations to improve service delivery. </p>
<p>Their regular use means that large numbers of passengers and workers are exposed to high levels of discomfort, safety and other problems which undermine the quality of passengers’ experience.</p>
<p>It is against this backdrop that ride-hailing arrived in Ghana; Uber was the first to launch operations there in July 2016. It alone is estimated to have <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01258-6#Sec5">180,000 active riders</a> and some <a href="https://qz.com/africa/1090738/uber-is-marking-four-years-in-africa/">3,000 driver-partners</a>.</p>
<p>Our interviewees told us that ride-hailing companies are driving up the standards of commercial passenger transport. Ride-hailing trips are generally seen as affordable compared to hiring traditional taxicabs. The trips are also traceable, which reassures users that they can recover lost items or track down criminal drivers and passengers.</p>
<p>The problem, however, is that ride-hailing companies do not offer their drivers guaranteed incomes or wages. Neither do they pay them any benefits like social security. In fact, they <em>strenuously</em> avoid such employment obligations, insisting that their drivers are not their <a href="https://arizonastatelawjournal.org/2020/11/10/employees-or-independent-contractors-uber-and-lyft-avoid-reclassifying-their-drivers/">“employees”</a>.</p>
<p>The companies have been able to implement this business model easily in Ghana because the youth are desperate for jobs. To put the issue of youth unemployment into perspective, in 2018, the Ghana Immigration Service received <a href="https://www.pulse.com.gh/ece-frontpage/immigration-recruitment-only-500-out-of-84-000-applicants-will-be-employed-by/7dzdb3m">84,000 applications for just 500 entry level vacancies</a>.</p>
<p>Ghana’s youth unemployment, as with the problems with the popular transport systems, is linked to policy marginalisation. Successive governments have failed to create or stimulate the creation of enough secure jobs. Meanwhile, the state barely concerns itself with employment practices and labour relations and conditions in the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0502-8">passenger transport sector</a>. </p>
<p>These conditions are what have created room for international (and a few indigenous) ride-hailing companies and other powerful private interests (including vehicle owners) to profit from the labour of drivers they do not <em>‘employ’</em>. These issues will persist even if ride-hailing companies shut down tomorrow. </p>
<h2>Towards better protection</h2>
<p>All of these issues have led to dangerous tension between ride-hailing drivers and traditional drivers. Some have <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2018/04/what-is-uber-up-to-in-africa">been killed; cars are frequently burned</a>. Luckily Ghana hasn’t yet experienced any violent skirmishes – but <a href="https://trid.trb.org/view/1675221">the animosity</a> between different kinds of drivers is growing. </p>
<p>Ghana can learn from the emerging developments in <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/11/california-passes-assembly-bill-5-for-gig-workers.html">the US</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/business/uber-drivers-britain.html">the UK</a>, where lawmakers and the courts are strengthening labour protections for gig workers, including ride-hailing company drivers. </p>
<p>In some Australian cities, like Sydney, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/sep/22/nsw-levy-on-ride-hailing-and-taxi-passengers-extended-until-2029">lawmakers introduced rules that created an equal playing field for taxis and ride-hailing companies</a>. </p>
<p>If left unregulated, drivers of all stripes will continue to be disadvantaged. That’s bad for them, and it’s bad for their passengers. Now is the time for authorities to act.</p>
<p>Dr <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=uwa35PwAAAAJ&hl=en">Kingsley Tetteh Baako</a> of RMIT University, Australia contributed to the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01258-6#Sec5">original article</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191020/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Lawmakers and courts in Ghana must strengthen protections for drivers of ride hailing companiesFestival Godwin Boateng, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Sustainable Urban Development, The Earth Institute, Columbia UniversitySamuelson Appau, Assistant Professor, Melbourne Business SchoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1497622020-11-23T14:17:08Z2020-11-23T14:17:08ZFishing industry must do more to tackle human rights abuses – here’s where to start<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/369780/original/file-20201117-23-h4wle4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C6000%2C3997&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/fishermen-work-529355779">ZoranOrcik/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>You might opt for a tin of “dolphin-friendly” tuna as one way of ensuring the seafood you buy is ethically sourced. Certain fishing methods and equipment can kill a lot of sealife that boats aren’t even targeting, by ensnaring marine mammals or drowning seabirds. It’s important to consider how sustainable our choices are when shopping, but how can you guarantee that the people who catch your seafood are well treated?</p>
<p>The average consumer may not realise it, but the fishing industry is also tied to some horrific abuses of human rights. In putting a meal on the table, you may also be helping to sustain <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07118-9">patterns of exploitation and abuse</a> at sea.</p>
<p>Several reports have highlighted that some sectors of the fishing industry continue to use <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0210241">forced labour</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jun/10/-sp-migrant-workers-new-life-enslaved-thai-fishing">physical punishment</a>, and even deliberately <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/01/23/hidden-chains/rights-abuses-and-forced-labor-thailands-fishing-industry">kill workers</a>. Fishers can be extremely vulnerable while at sea, far out of sight of law enforcement agencies or help from friends and family. </p>
<p>Changes within the industry have exacerbated the problem. Factory ships, which were first seen in the whaling industry, are now <a href="https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/supertrawler-factory-fishing-ship-seen-17023018">commonly sighted</a> processing fish in the waters of many states. Smaller fishing vessels now visit them to offload their catches rather than returning to shore themselves. The result is that some fishers now spend weeks or months aboard, isolated from support networks on land. </p>
<p>Many boats sail under “flags of convenience”, which means that their owners have registered them with a country that <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/usfm32&div=6&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals">will not extend</a> any real scrutiny over working conditions. Despite international agreements that notionally protect workers, employers can exploit these enforcement gaps to ignore workers’ rights.</p>
<p>The global epicentre of abuse is the Gulf of Thailand – the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X16000622">main source</a> of prawns for the UK and US market. A <a href="https://www.ilo.org/asia/media-centre/news/WCMS_220597/lang--en/index.htm">survey</a> by the International Labour Organisation found that at least one in six workers in the region had either been coerced or deceived into working against their will. </p>
<p>But forced labour has even been reported in the coastal waters of countries thought to have much stronger worker protections, such as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/01/slavery-warning-uk-scallop-fisheries">UK</a> and <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/ajoinl7&div=9&g_sent=1&casa_token=BzB5pHwYTw8AAAAA:xc60T1blKsBNRYfXYuXFlIvJUTwLEsuIlpcWS_OZS3jYMH1vXepmnCIyUKMgMrgVt92fHceG&collection=journals">New Zealand</a>. These abuses are still largely invisible to people buying seafood or fish-based products, including dietary supplements and pet food. Most people would be appalled to know that their purchases are helping to keep unscrupulous businesses afloat. </p>
<h2>Promoting better practices</h2>
<p>Protecting workers far out at sea may seem difficult, but there is <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopp.12238">much that can be done</a> to make workers’ rights in the fishing industry more secure. The international <a href="https://www.msc.org">Marine Stewardship Council</a> awards its famous blue tick to fish caught sustainably and without harming other wildlife. </p>
<p>At present, the Council <a href="https://www.msc.org/what-we-are-doing/our-approach/forced-and-child-labour">denies certification</a> to companies that have been caught using forced labour in the last two years. To ensure the blue tick helps protect core labour rights, certification should also be conditional on fair pay, written contracts, a commitment to ending the dangerous culture of long working hours, and decent health and safety standards. With robust guarantees, consumers can make more ethical choices when buying seafood. </p>
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<img alt="A 'certified sustainable seafood' sign next to a pool." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370115/original/file-20201118-21-1kxyknl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/370115/original/file-20201118-21-1kxyknl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370115/original/file-20201118-21-1kxyknl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370115/original/file-20201118-21-1kxyknl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370115/original/file-20201118-21-1kxyknl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370115/original/file-20201118-21-1kxyknl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/370115/original/file-20201118-21-1kxyknl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A zoo enclosure sports the Marine Stewardship Council’s blue tick.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/sydney-nsw-australia-january-30th-2020-1649114617">Cromo Digital/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Companies involved in the fish trade can make a major contribution. <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/contents/enacted">The UK’s Modern Slavery Act of 2015</a> requires large corporations to report on the risk of slavery and forced labour within their supply chains. It’s not clear that the Act has had a decisive impact on the fishing industry yet, but if properly enforced, it could provide a vital safeguard. Other countries should adopt similar standards, and enforce them consistently. </p>
<p>Governments could also refuse import licences for fish sourced from countries which refuse to drive out exploitative labour practices. By raising the profile of these issues, non-governmental organisations such as <a href="https://www.humanrightsatsea.org">Human Rights At Sea</a> will also be invaluable. </p>
<p>After being rocked by a series of abuse scandals, New Zealand has <a href="https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/new-zealand-moves-to-compensate-slave-like-fishermen">taken steps</a> to ensure that employers who use slave labour can’t operate in its waters. It now only allows New Zealand-flagged vessels to fish those waters, enabling it to apply robust labour laws more easily. Other countries should similarly to make their shores less hospitable to abusive employers. Short of following New Zealand’s example, other states could at least refuse access to vessels operating under flags of convenience. </p>
<p>Coastal states often appear willing to wash their hands of workers’ rights violations on foreign vessels. But this is inexcusable. No state should sell access to its waters unless employers agree to respect core standards on working hours, contracts, and health and safety. Until we make progress in protecting workers’ rights, the simple act of buying fish may mean we are supporting cruel and exploitative practices in the industry.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149762/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Armstrong received funding from the British Academy / Leverhulme Trust to support this research. </span></em></p>One in six fishers in the Gulf of Thailand have been coerced or deceived into working against their will.Chris Armstrong, Professor of Political Theory, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1333922020-04-21T13:41:41Z2020-04-21T13:41:41ZThe green gig economy: precarious workers are on the frontline of climate change fight<p>Politicians and business people are fond of making promises to plant thousands of trees to slow climate change. But who actually plants those trees, and who tends them as they grow?</p>
<p>The hard and dirty work of <a href="https://theconversation.com/national-service-for-the-environment-and-a-green-new-deal-to-fight-climate-change-imagine-newsletter-1-114168">restoring ecosystems</a> will be invaluable in coming decades, to soak up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, ease the impact of storms and flooding and harbour embattled wildlife. But this work – where it currently exists – is carried out by people who are often poorly paid, or not compensated at all.</p>
<p>Most often, these aren’t recognised workers, but instead, volunteers. This is not only the case for conservation workers in rural areas of Madagascar and Cambodia, but also in cities where waste collectors and people who recycle electronic waste work in abject poverty. </p>
<p>The situation is more dire for those battling the natural disasters that are proliferating in the warming climate. The 2018 wildfire season in California was the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/7/17661096/california-wildfires-2018-camp-woolsey-climate-change">deadliest in the state’s history</a>, but much of the fire fighting relied on <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/8/9/17670494/california-prison-labor-mendocino-carr-ferguson-wildfires">2,000 prison inmates</a> who earned just USD$1 a day. </p>
<p>During Australia’s “black summer” of 2019-20, Prime Minister Scott Morrison rejected calls for support payments to 195,000 volunteer firefighters because, in his words, “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/10/scott-morrison-rejects-calls-for-more-help-saying-volunteer-firefighters-want-to-be-there">they want to be there</a>”.</p>
<p>The UK is braced for a future in which <a href="https://theconversation.com/get-used-to-flooding-climate-change-will-bring-more-of-it-23198">flooding is more frequent and severe</a>. But the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) <a href="https://nationalfloodforum.org.uk/how-we-help/get-involved/our-volunteers/">relies heavily on volunteer labour</a> to manage these floods when they occur, and that’s <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-weather-the-rise-of-the-flood-volunteer-9129351.html">set to remain the case</a>.</p>
<p>These workers lack the proper pay and protections of an organised workforce, yet their <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132518799911">services are increasingly in demand</a>. Collectively, they form an emerging “eco-precariat” that bears little resemblance to the <a href="https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2020/04/01/re-thinking-work-from-the-global-south/">labour movement</a> that’s urgently needed to mitigate the climate and ecological crisis.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/unions-can-and-will-play-a-leading-role-in-tackling-the-climate-crisis-113226">Unions can – and will – play a leading role in tackling the climate crisis</a>
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<h2>Precarity in the green economy</h2>
<p>The modern “<a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/gig-economy-19448">gig economy</a>” sells independence to workers by allowing them to decide their own work hours. For taxi drivers or couriers, this may sound appealing, but in practice it can mean a precarious existence, trapped with a variable income and permanently on call <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/30/the-guardian-view-on-the-gig-economy-stop-making-burnout-a-lifestyle">in zero-hour contracts</a>. Those with an uncertain immigration status can fall into forms of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-uk-asylum-system-creates-perfect-conditions-for-modern-slavery-and-exploitation-to-thrive-113778">modern day slavery</a>. </p>
<p>Our research studied <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anti.12593">labour practices in the green economy</a> and in particular, the schemes in which people and organisations “buy” green services, like ecosystem conservation and tree planting. </p>
<p>These projects range from direct payments to governments for forest and mangrove protection, to carbon markets, in which credits are sold to finance conservation work. A growing number of <a href="https://theconversation.com/ces-arbres-qui-cachent-des-forets-de-greenwashing-105744#comment_1763361">corporations pay</a> to offset the local environmental damage they cause this way - enabling them to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/opinion/trump-climate-change-trees.html">neglect action to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions</a>. There’s even a smartphone <a href="https://www.trilliontreecampaign.org/">app that will “plant a tree”</a> at the touch of a button.</p>
<p>The idea of trees being planted at the touch of a screen sounds revolutionary. But this work tends to draw on a flexible labour pool – a sort of “green gig economy”. While private sector donations are funnelled through charities and NGOs overseeing the tree planting, the work itself is offered on a temporary basis, often to unpaid volunteers – <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2020/01/madagascar-launches-massive-planting-drive-eyes-60-million-trees/">including school children</a> - who are deployed to plant and care for the trees.</p>
<p>Even as local people are enlisted to manage tree planting, they find their <a href="https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123308">access to these areas restricted</a>. In some cases, tree planting initiatives have <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2514848618812029">uprooted communities</a> and repossessed their land.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/greenwashing-corporate-tree-planting-generates-goodwill-but-may-sometimes-harm-the-planet-103457">Greenwashing: corporate tree planting generates goodwill but may sometimes harm the planet</a>
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<h2>Essential workers</h2>
<p>As the pandemic has shown, volunteers and community groups can hold the social fabric together <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-community-led-movement-creating-hope-in-the-time-of-coronavirus-134391">in times of crisis</a>. Whether it’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/science/coronavirus-masks-equipment-crowdsource.html">ordinary people creating medical equipment</a> or <a href="https://covidmutualaid.org/">caring for neighbours in quarantine</a>, community action can save lives where years of austerity have starved emergency services of the necessary resources for dealing with disasters.</p>
<p>The same can be said of volunteer fire fighters and foresters, but cheering on their selflessness isn’t enough. We should recognise where labour arrangements have created precarious working conditions, or enabled governments to shift their responsibilities onto the public.</p>
<p>Will volunteer fire fighters continue to go without compensation, even as their work becomes more dangerous in Australia’s increasingly fierce wildfire seasons? As governments consider <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-how-economic-rescue-plans-can-set-the-global-economy-on-a-path-to-decarbonisation-135909">how to revive the global economy</a> after the COVID-19 pandemic, what legal protections can workers in new environmental projects depend on? </p>
<p>Now more than ever, it’s time for a frank discussion about what essential workers deserve in return for the invaluable work they do.</p>
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/imagine-newsletter-researchers-think-of-a-world-with-climate-action-113443?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=Imagineheader1133392">Click here to subscribe to our climate action newsletter. Climate change is inevitable. Our response to it isn’t.</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/133392/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sango Mahanty receives funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benjamin Neimark does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>During California’s deadliest wildfire season, 2,000 prison inmates fought the flames on USD$1 a day.Sango Mahanty, Associate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National UniversityBenjamin Neimark, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1255862019-10-24T14:44:00Z2019-10-24T14:44:00ZSouth Africa’s TV actors have every reason to demand a better deal<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/298293/original/file-20191023-119459-1qmle2a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Every few months there’s a fresh outcry from South African actors complaining about exploitative working conditions in the film and television industry.
Last year cast and crew were up in arms about an actor who needlessly <a href="https://city-press.news24.com/News/what-killed-odwa-shweni-20180513">fell to his death</a> from a waterfall during a film shoot. Most recently award-winning actress Vatiswa Ndara penned <a href="https://twitter.com/theVati_Can/status/1181119732906377216/photo/1">an angry open letter</a> to the country’s arts and sports minister. Among the issues she raised were that actors are underpaid, particularly given the excessive workload being placed on them. </p>
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<span class="caption">Jack Devnarain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">SAGA</span></span>
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<span class="caption">Adrian Galley.</span>
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<p>Ndara also took aim at unfair contracts and rates that haven’t changed in 20 years, and lack of repeat fees for the stars of TV shows that are rebroadcast. She also raised the prevalence of sexual harassment, bullying and a lack of safety. Seasoned actress and lecturer Fiona Ramsay asks Jack Devnarain, chair of the <a href="https://www.saguildofactors.co.za/">South African Guild of Actors</a> and his deputy Adrian Galley, to provide some context.</p>
<p><strong>Are South Africa’s television actors underpaid and subject to exploitative contracts?</strong></p>
<p>It is largely true that rates for actors in South Africa have been static for two decades. And, while it may be that budgets are strained, the pressure is not evenly distributed across the value chain and the most vulnerable are worse off.</p>
<p>Unlike musicians, actors have never enjoyed a statutory right to performance royalties. Residual earnings are of two kinds: repeat broadcast fees, for any further broadcasts on the same channel; and further commercial exploitation fees, linked to sales of the program to other broadcasters.</p>
<p>Freelance contracts have contained provisions for both types of residual fees since the mid 1990s. But broadcasters have been reluctant to meet their obligations. One of the issues contributing to <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2014-08-18-striking-generations-actors-a-no-show">a strike</a> by actors in the country’s longest running TV soap opera, <em>Generations</em>, was the broadcaster’s unwillingness to distribute funds generated through the sale of the series throughout Africa and as far afield as Jamaica. The strike led to the dismissal of 16 actors and the collapse of the production. </p>
<p>Only one major broadcaster honours contractual provisions for rebroadcast and compensate when productions are sold on to other territories.</p>
<p>For the first time in the country’s history, a statutory right for actors to receive a performers’ royalty is contained in pending legislation. The <a href="https://www.parliament.gov.za/storage/app/media/Docs/bill/45550480-97f6-4839-83ce-f285de169a6a.pdf">Performers Protection Amendment Bill</a> and its companion <a href="https://pmg.org.za/bill/705/">Copyright Amendment Bill</a> sit on the president’s desk awaiting his signature. </p>
<p><strong>What labour laws protect South African actors, who are all essentially freelancers?</strong></p>
<p>Actors are particularly vulnerable to exploitation as their legal status is unclear. As freelancers rather than employees, actors are explicitly denied any form of protection under labour law. </p>
<p>That would include a right to collective bargaining. Any attempt to organise around minimum rates has been with sanction from the <a href="http://www.compcom.co.za/">Competition Commission</a>. For example, it recently ordered the South African Guild of Actors to take down suggested rates guidelines published on our website. The commission accused the guild of price-fixing.</p>
<p>Actors also have no statutory right to participate in creating or monitoring health and safety standards in their work environments.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.ilo.org/global/lang--en/index.htm">International Labour Organisation</a> recognises a class of <a href="https://www.ilo.org/actrav/areas/WCMS_DOC_ATR_ARE_INF_EN/lang--en/index.htm">“atypical workers”</a> – those who work outside the formal economy, known as the <a href="https://theconversation.com/work-in-the-gig-economy-one-night-stand-or-a-meaningful-relationship-111047">gig economy</a>. The South African Guild of Actors is lobbying for the Department of Labour to recognise certain minimum rights for atypical workers under the <a href="https://www.gov.za/sites/default/files/gcis_document/201409/a75-97.pdf">Basic Conditions of Employment Act</a>.</p>
<p>As independent contractors, actors are expressly prevented from even claiming from the country’s unemployment insurance fund. </p>
<p><strong>Do South African actors have it worse off than in the rest of the world?</strong></p>
<p>Never mind the rest of the world, South African actors are lagging behind the rest of the continent when it comes to a recognition of our rights. </p>
<p>South Africa, once a leader in Africa, now lags behind in adopting any form of regulatory framework for the entertainment and audiovisual production sector and the use of technology to monitor and enforce those rights. </p>
<p>For example, in Kenya, the <a href="https://www.prisk.or.ke/index.php/en/">Collective Management Organisation PRiSK</a> employs sophisticated technology to track, collect and distribute performance royalties generated globally for local actors. </p>
<p>And actors in Morocco work in a regulated environment. Their performers’ union <a href="https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2019/04/271504/new-measures-social-protection-moroccan-artists/#targetText=The%20Minister%20Mohamed%20Laaraj%20met,social%20security%20for%20Moroccan%20artists.&targetText=In%202016%2C%20Morocco%20introduced%20a,rights%20under%20Moroccan%20labor%20law.">SMPAD</a> recently spearheaded the adoption of legislation that establishes a system of social protection for actors. </p>
<p>Zimbabwe was the most recent African country to the <a href="https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/beijing/">Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performance</a> which aims to secure the economic and moral rights for actors worldwide. Zimbabwe joined Tunisia, Nigeria, Mali, Gabon, Burkina Faso, and Botswana in adopting the treaty. South Africa has yet to add its signature.</p>
<p>South Africa’s actors are hailed as ambassadors when they are on the world stage. But the truth is that they are seldom given the same respect at home.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/125586/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fiona Ramsay does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>South African actors are lobbying government to demand better working conditions and labour protection.Fiona Ramsay, Head of Department of Theatre and Performance and PhD candidate, University of the WitwatersrandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1209892019-08-07T01:24:00Z2019-08-07T01:24:00ZMost migrants on bridging visas aren’t ‘scammers’, they’re well within their rights<p><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-23/bridging-visas-surging-malaysians-horticulture/11314214">Recent articles</a> in the media have raised concerns about the rapid rise in migrants living and working in Australia on bridging visas, whose numbers have more than doubled in the last four years. </p>
<p>A bridging visa is granted to anyone who makes a visa application from within Australia. This form of visa comes into effect if the visa someone already holds expires while they’re in the country.</p>
<p>As of March 31, there were <a href="https://data.gov.au/dataset/ds-dga-ab245863-4dea-4661-a334-71ee15937130/details?q=temporary%20visa">229,242</a> people in Australia who held a bridging visa, the highest-ever figure in Australian history. A significant portion of bridging visa applicants are skilled and family migrants, often partners of Australian permanent residents and citizens. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/migration-is-a-growing-issue-but-it-remains-a-challenge-to-define-who-actually-is-a-migrant-114443">Migration is a growing issue, but it remains a challenge to define who actually is a migrant</a>
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<p>But living on a bridging visa is a form of migration limbo as the Department of Home Affairs does not disclose how long any individual case may take to process. Migrants do not know if their application will be approved tomorrow, or if they will be waiting on a bridging visa for another year or more.</p>
<p>What’s more, employers and labour recruiters, especially in the horticultural industry, are <a href="https://sydney.edu.au/content/dam/corporate/documents/business-school/research/work-and-organisational-studies/towards-a-durable-future-report.pdf">taking advantage</a> of these migrants as cheap temporary labour. </p>
<h2>Most migrants on bridging visas aren’t ‘scammers’</h2>
<p><a href="https://sydney.edu.au/content/dam/corporate/documents/business-school/research/work-and-organisational-studies/towards-a-durable-future-report.pdf">Evidence</a> is emerging that increasing numbers of migrants arriving on tourist visas are applying for humanitarian or protection visas once they’re in the country. </p>
<p>This is the group Kristina Keneally, the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, refers to as “<a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/spotlight-shifts-from-boat-people-to-record-numbers-of-airplane-people">airplane people</a>”. She criticises the Coalition for trumpeting a hard-line approach to offshore detention and “stopping the boats” when asylum seekers are arriving by other means and seeking protection onshore in increasing numbers.</p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-people-seeking-asylum-in-australia-access-higher-education-and-the-enormous-barriers-they-face-107892">How people seeking asylum in Australia access higher education, and the enormous barriers they face</a>
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<p>This exploitation of temporary visa pathways is a growing concern and warrants investigation. But associating all bridging visas with “scammers” and “illegal migrants” misses the bigger picture of the role bridging visas play in our changing immigration regime and the inequalities they can create for migrants who are operating completely within the rules of the system. </p>
<p>They meet all the legal criteria for migration and are simply waiting for their applications to be processed by the Department of Home Affairs. For example, while there were <a href="https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-stats/files/ohp-june-18.pdf">28,000 applicants</a> for onshore asylum visas in 2017-18, there were more than <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/api/qon/downloadattachment?attachmentId=0feb0444-bd3c-4b20-a3e4-3475c78c1423">125,000 people</a> holding a bridging visa and waiting for their permanent visa application to be finalised. </p>
<h2>Growing wait times for partner visas</h2>
<p>Perhaps the primary reason for the so-called “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-23/bridging-visas-surging-malaysians-horticulture/11314214">blowout</a>” in bridging visas – as quoted in an ABC article – is simply because more legitimate applications for skilled and family migration are now made in Australia and waiting times for visa processing have increased. </p>
<p>Compare permanent partner visas in 2009-10 and 2017-18. There were about <a href="https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-stats/files/report-on-migration-program-2009-10.pdf">53,000</a> applicants for partner visas in 2009-10. And there were 27,000 people waiting in the queue in June 2010. </p>
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<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-cutting-australias-migrant-intake-would-do-more-harm-than-good-at-least-for-the-next-decade-108748">Why cutting Australia's migrant intake would do more harm than good, at least for the next decade</a>
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<p>Eight years later, there were <a href="https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-stats/files/report-migration-program-2017-18.pdf">54,000</a> applicants for partner visas, but with fewer places available (39,800) and more than 80,000 people waiting in the queue. </p>
<p>This means if you applied for a partner visa in June 2010, you were looking at about a six to eight month wait. And by June 2018, this had become around a two-year wait. </p>
<p>A consequence of under-resourcing in the Department of Home Affairs is that the time migrants spend living on bridging visas is increasing as the time taken to process a visa application grows. What’s more, waiting times for sponsored skilled work visas like the Employer Nomination Scheme can take <a href="https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-processing-times/global-visa-processing-times">up to 19 months</a>.</p>
<h2>Barriers to economic and social inclusion</h2>
<p>These long waits create significant barriers to the economic and social inclusion of these migrants. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/labors-crackdown-on-temporary-visa-requirements-wont-much-help-australian-workers-115844">Labor's crackdown on temporary visa requirements won't much help Australian workers</a>
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<p>One of the most significant issues is the stigma around bridging visas in the employment market. Although many of these migrants have in-demand skills, local work experience, and the strong desire to work, many Australian employers refuse to hire workers on bridging visas, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1468796813504552">leading to deskilling, exploitation and financial stress</a>.</p>
<p>Long waits on bridging visas can create specific vulnerabilities for women on partner visas, making them highly dependent on their partners, and often <a href="https://www.secasa.com.au/assets/Documents/Promoting-community-led-responses-to-violence-against-immigrant-and-refugee-women-.pdf">unable to access adequate support in situations of domestic abuse</a>. </p>
<p>In research conducted on the experiences of migrants on the “<a href="https://shanthirobertson.com/staggered-pathways/">staggered pathway</a>” from temporariness to permanence, migrants report being denied mobile phone contracts, personal loans or rental accommodation because of their bridging visas. </p>
<p>Travel restrictions placed on some bridging visas also prevent migrants from travelling home to care for family members or attend family events. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/yes-peter-dutton-has-a-lot-of-power-but-a-strong-home-affairs-is-actually-a-good-thing-for-australia-121047">Yes, Peter Dutton has a lot of power, but a strong Home Affairs is actually a good thing for Australia</a>
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<p>Transparent and faster processing would mitigate many of the issues with bridging visas, whether for those exploiting the system or for those legitimate migrants stuck in the indefinite wait. </p>
<p>Minimising time spent on bridging visas means onshore migrants can participate fully in both the economy and the community.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/120989/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shanthi Robertson receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry Sherrell receives funding from the Scanlon Foundation and is affiliated with the Cities and Settlement Initiative run by the Centre for Policy Development.</span></em></p>Associating all bridging visas with ‘scammers’ and ‘illegal migrants’ misses the bigger picture of the role bridging visas play in our changing immigration regime.Shanthi Robertson, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney UniversityHenry Sherrell, Researcher, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1051652018-10-18T12:38:09Z2018-10-18T12:38:09ZModern slavery: migrants forced to work gruelling hours at hand car washes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241202/original/file-20181018-41132-ko9aui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/arthurjohnpicton/4767626441/">SomeDriftwood/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Chances are you will have seen them, at the side of the road, at petrol stations or supermarket car parks. You might have even used one – with low competitive pricing and a quick finish, it’s hard not to feel like a hand car wash is a bit of a bargain. But our <a href="http://www.antislaverycommissioner.co.uk/media/1238/labour-exploitation-in-hand-car-washes.pdf">new report</a> reveals that some hand car washes in the UK may involve modern slavery, human trafficking and labour exploitation.</p>
<p>Police forces interviewed as part of our research say there has been a rise in hand car wash business activities in their areas. And interviews suggest that some workers are subject to some form of labour and employment violation. This includes pay below the national minimum wage or working excessive hours. </p>
<p>The report finds that the average wage for a day’s work in a hand car wash – ranging between eight and 12 hours – is around £40. The study also confirms that many hand car washes are run by migrants for migrants. Survey responses from police forces identified 26 nationalities working in hand car washes across the UK (mainly Eastern European). Romanian was the most common nationality.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.antislaverycommissioner.co.uk/media/1238/labour-exploitation-in-hand-car-washes.pdf">new report</a> is a collaborative study between experts at the University of Nottingham’s <a href="https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/world/beacons/rights-lab/">Rights Lab</a> and the <a href="http://www.antislaverycommissioner.co.uk/">Office of the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner </a>. The team brought together existing research and information, including press reports, parliamentary evidence submitted to the Environmental Audit Committee, and new information from interviews with police authorities and key stakeholders.</p>
<h2>Far from clean</h2>
<p>Before 2004, hand car washes were virtually nonexistent. But since then, many have sprung up on the side of the road, petrol stations, disused forecourts, supermarket car parks and former public car parks. Hand car washes are not an unlawful business activity. Yet, growing <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/16/true-human-cost-5-pound-hand-car-wash-modern-slavery">awareness of their activities</a> has unearthed a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-slavery-carwash/modern-slavery-seeps-through-murky-world-of-britains-car-washes-idUSKBN1D80XI">host of violations</a> – which allow their operations an unfair commercial competitive advantage.</p>
<p>A concern of hand car washes is the prevalence of labour exploitation and modern slavery. Our report reveals how police investigations have found issues around wages, working conditions, and health and safety. Reportedly, some workers were also housed in substandard or dilapidated accommodation. In 2015, a Romanian national, <a href="http://www.itv.com/news/london/2017-01-18/car-wash-owner-jailed-after-employee-is-electrocuted-in-rat-infested-flat/">Sandu Laurentiu-Sava</a>, who worked at a hand car wash was electrocuted to death while showering because his employer was bypassing the electricity meter. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241204/original/file-20181018-41156-pkhcew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241204/original/file-20181018-41156-pkhcew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241204/original/file-20181018-41156-pkhcew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241204/original/file-20181018-41156-pkhcew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241204/original/file-20181018-41156-pkhcew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241204/original/file-20181018-41156-pkhcew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241204/original/file-20181018-41156-pkhcew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241204/original/file-20181018-41156-pkhcew.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Excessively long hours and exceptionally low pay are common.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/iancvt55/5602160189/">Ian/flickr</a></span>
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<p>At present, the UK does not have a system to license and register hand car washes. As a result, it is difficult to assess the number of operations, their location and the true scale of labour exploitation. In the absence of such data, our report aims to provide a better understanding of labour abuses in this sector. It also explores the challenges and approaches to tackling them.</p>
<h2>Labour exploitation</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://www.antislaverycommissioner.co.uk/media/1238/labour-exploitation-in-hand-car-washes.pdf">report</a> identifies issues across the spectrum of labour exploitation, from lower level forms of abuse to modern slavery and human trafficking. One police force interviewed described cases of individuals trafficked from Romania. They were made to work in hand car washes for two weeks and only paid £10. The workers hoovered coins from the cars they washed to survive. </p>
<p>But despite the circumstances many of these workers are in, we found that many do not identify themselves as victims – hand car washing is seen as a better opportunity compared with alternative employment options. </p>
<p>And because many of these workers don’t see themselves as victims, it could lead to law enforcement overlooking exploitative labour practices. The report also found that the status of a worker in the UK may hinder the identification of victims. This is because workers may choose not to engage with law enforcement, or because they may ultimately be treated as illegal immigrants. </p>
<h2>Inadequate enforcement</h2>
<p>Hand car washes are often described as unregulated operations. But like other businesses operating in the UK, there are regulations to which they should adhere. These includes planning permission, paying business rates, environmental policies – including permission to dispose of liquid waste – paying national insurance, corporate tax, national minimum wage, and health and safety. And turning a “blind-eye” to noncompliance has allowed operations to flourish.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241206/original/file-20181018-41144-mwernu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241206/original/file-20181018-41144-mwernu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241206/original/file-20181018-41144-mwernu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241206/original/file-20181018-41144-mwernu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=463&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241206/original/file-20181018-41144-mwernu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241206/original/file-20181018-41144-mwernu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/241206/original/file-20181018-41144-mwernu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=582&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Thousands of workers in hand car washes across Britain are believed to be modern slaves.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tcee35mm/34239145843/">Tee Cee/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Of course, these types of businesses can operate ethically and responsibly. But given that exploitation of workers at hand car washes hides in plain sight, it highlights the role the public can play in shedding light on abusive labour practices. One way people can do this is by using <a href="https://www.theclewerinitiative.org/safe-car-wash-app/">The Safe Car Wash app</a>. The app offers motorists a checklist to fill in when they use a hand car wash – and a number to call if warning signs are flagged up.</p>
<p>This is important, because while it might be easy to ignore the problem, the reality is about real people who may be trapped in exploitation, living under the threat of violence, with no alternative options.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105165/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Akilah Jardine is a Research Associate with the Rights Lab, a University of Nottingham Beacon of Excellence
Akilah Jardine has received in-kind support from the Office of the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner to complete the research cited in this article.</span></em></p>Most hand car wash workers are subject to some form of labour exploitation, says new reportAkilah Jardine, Research Fellow in Antislavery Business and Communities, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1010302018-08-06T02:40:13Z2018-08-06T02:40:13ZApple, the $1 trillion company searching for its soul<p>Apple has become the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/08/apple-1-trillion-market-cap/566672/">first American company to reach US$1 trillion in market capitalisation</a> – US$1,000,000,000,000 in stockmarket value. Behind this glittering success, however, lies a series of unresolved ethical dilemmas.</p>
<p>The approaches of Apple and the other giant US platform technology companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon) to corporate taxation, concentration and privacy have <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/company-tax/fair-taxation-digital-economy_en">attracted widespread criticism</a>.</p>
<p>But as a manufacturing company Apple faces a more deep-seated problem. This involves the millions of people employed in its supply chain, which is largely located in China with the major contractor <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Foxconn-Apple-and-the-partnership-that-changed-the-tech-sector">Foxconn</a>.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-bloody-decade-of-the-iphone-82974">A bloody decade of the iPhone</a>
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<p><a href="https://rdcu.be/3WF8">Our research shows</a> human rights, environmental and ethical problems persist inside Apple’s vast global supply chains. </p>
<p><a href="https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=2763&context=globaldocs">Low pay</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/technology/foxconn-said-to-use-forced-student-labor-to-make-iphones.html">poor working conditions</a> and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com.au/greenpeace-ifixit-report-apple-environmental-problem-eco-waste-2017-6">environmental hazards</a> in supplier factories in China and across Asia are sources of long-running controversies. <a href="http://www.scmp.com/article/733389/struggle-foxconn-girl-who-wanted-die">Suicides of workers</a> subject to the <a href="https://www.somo.nl/workers-as-machines-military-management-in-foxconn/">intensive work regime</a> of these factories shocked Apple into action.</p>
<p>Apple does address these disturbing issues in its <a href="https://www.apple.com/au/supplier-responsibility/">annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Report</a>. Progress has been <a href="https://www.somo.nl/foxconn-and-apple-fail-to-fulfill-promises/">uneven and limited</a>, but the company has created the <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/the-feed/opinion-corporate-social-responsibility-is-a-band-aid-for-a-broken-system">appearance of corporate social responsibility</a>. Any reputational damage does not seem to undermine financial results.</p>
<p>Still, for a company as successful as Apple, the failure to find a permanent solution to recurrent environmental and labour issues in its global value chain is not acceptable.</p>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-least-skilled-workers-are-the-losers-in-globalisation-63655">The least-skilled workers are the losers in globalisation</a>
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<h2>What makes Apple successful</h2>
<p>Apple is not the largest smart phone manufacturer in the world (the increasingly sophisticated Samsung and Huawei are), it is just <a href="http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/05/07/apple-cash-reserves-greater-than-those-held-by-most-us-industries-combined">the most profitable</a>. Its <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-02/apple-aapl-at-1-trillion-honey-i-shrunk-the-profit-margins">profit margins have topped 20% for more than a decade</a>. While its profit has slipped in recent years, it is much higher than its competitors.</p>
<p>The result is a <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/news/apple-now-bigger-these-5-things/">huge cash hoard</a>. Apple holds more cash than most American industries combined, and <a href="https://www.cultofmac.com/311876/apples-massive-cash-hoard-makes-richer-141-countries/">even many countries</a>.</p>
<p>Apple’s sustained competitive advantage is not simply due to innovation, superior design and marketing. It’s also a result of its domination of the advanced consumer electronics supply chain. Apple has effectively created a closed ecosystem, controlling every part of the supply chain from design to retail. </p>
<p>Disaggregating the global value chain enables the most profitable activities, including design, finance, marketing and sales, to be retained in the home country. The less profitable labour-intensive activities are given to contractors in developing countries, where wages and conditions are often much poorer.</p>
<p>Apple <a href="http://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1891314">sources most of its components from manufacturers in Asia</a>. The poor working conditions at the bottom of these value chains gave rise to the term “<a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8652295/Apple-HP-and-Dell-among-companies-responsible-for-electronic-sweatshops-claims-report.html">electronics sweatshop</a>”.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04vs348">According to activist Li Qiang</a>, of US-based China Labour Watch:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Without China, Apple wouldn’t be the company it is today. No other country can provide labour so cheaply and make its products so quickly.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-businesses-can-do-to-stamp-out-slavery-in-their-supply-chains-82640">What businesses can do to stamp out slavery in their supply chains</a>
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<p>But the interplay between global economic forces and local circumstances <a href="http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpe.2013.04.013">poses challenges</a> for economic security, and business accountability, transparency and integrity.</p>
<h2>Arm’s-length morality</h2>
<p>In its Supplier Code of Conduct, Apple <a href="https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple_Supplier_Code_of_Conduct.pdf">states</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Apple suppliers are required to provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, act fairly and ethically, and use environmentally responsible practices wherever they make products or perform services for Apple […] Apple will assess its suppliers’ compliance with this Code, and any violations of this Code may jeopardize the supplier’s business relationship with Apple, up to and including termination.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This statement goes a long way in explaining the normative basis on which Apple operates: an arm’s-length morality that imposes responsibility on others.</p>
<p>As Apple shifts the burden of cost and production, its suppliers <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html">make the labourers carry the burden</a> through low wages and unsafe conditions. </p>
<p>Regrettably, workers receive little protection from government or regulatory authorities. Independent trade unions are <a href="https://theconversation.com/chinas-growing-labour-movement-offers-hope-for-workers-globally-39921">forbidden in China</a>. Labour strikes are illegal and considered counter-revolutionary (though they often occur in local disputes).</p>
<p>The result is a degree of labour flexibility that creates a race to the bottom, threatening the most basic labour standards and environmental standards in developing countries.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-we-can-learn-from-chinas-fight-against-environmental-ruin-99681">What we can learn from China’s fight against environmental ruin</a>
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<h2>Ensuring integrity in the global value chain</h2>
<p>It appears the beauty of Apple’s brilliant design ultimately rests upon the suffering of workers in electronic sweatshops, where human rights, labour standards, environmental safety and business integrity are routinely ignored. </p>
<p>These abuses were first <a href="https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/inside-apples-ipod-factories-14915/">brought to Apple’s attention in 2006</a>. The company has made <a href="http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-30/business/sns-rt-us-apple-foxconnbre82s197-20120329_1_chinese-workers-apple-devices-hon-hai-precision-industry">some efforts to eradicate problems</a> and enforce higher standards.</p>
<p>However, there is evidence to suggest the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04vs348">intensity of the production regimes</a> being enforced to meet product launches often overwhelms Apple’s interventions to advance audit and management systems and improve standards in suppliers’ factories. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6441102/">Bleak working conditions</a> persist throughout much of the electronics supply chain in Asia. </p>
<p>With Apple’s vast cash reserves, the obvious question is why doesn’t it resolve these problems once and for all? The answer is that to a significant degree Apple is held hostage by the capital markets to control costs and feels compelled to disgorge tens of billions of dollars in dividends and share buy-backs or face the wrath of the hedge funds. The laser focus is on Apple’s share price, not the welfare of its contractors’ employees.</p>
<p>The future innovative capacity (and ethical principles) of Apple <a href="https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity">are in jeopardy</a> when <em>value creation</em> becomes defined as <em>value extraction</em>. Boards focus solely upon “returning” cash to shareholders who never provided the cash to develop the company in the first place.</p>
<p>As the market leader, and the most successful consumer electronics company in the world, Apple has a particular responsibility to ensure the integrity and responsibility of its value chain.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101030/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The company’s value exceeds the GDP of many countries, but Apple has human rights, ethical and environmental problems to match in its vast supply chain.Thomas Clarke, Professor, UTS Business, University of Technology SydneyMartijn Boersma, Lecturer, University of Technology SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/998632018-07-18T13:24:28Z2018-07-18T13:24:28ZSome people trapped in ‘modern slavery’ are underworked – and they pay a heavy price for it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227679/original/file-20180715-27039-1s2o5hd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/farmer-tractor-preparing-land-seedbed-cultivator-414636535?src=0fNe7bvVGxf2GtTzSCHXmA-2-57">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>People trapped in modern slavery situations endure terrible conditions, threats to their safety, and limits on their freedom. Yet sometimes, they actually do less work than they really want to. It may sound unlikely, but as a business model of exploitation, it has its own warped logic. </p>
<p>The term “modern slavery” <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-does-modern-slavery-look-like-61187">usually describes</a> the very worst forms of human exploitation. Whether it is young girls forced into prostitution, construction workers trapped in bonded labour, or migrants forced onto fishing vessels to work for years at a time for no pay, the creativity with which exploitation is used to generate profits for some, at a terrible cost to others, knows few bounds. </p>
<p>The economic logic of extreme exploitation appears to be pretty simple. By using violence, threats or deception to force people into work they would not otherwise do, the exploiter solves a labour supply problem, reduces labour costs, and gets a lot more work out of people than if they were freely employed. </p>
<p>Most accounts of forced labour include descriptions of arduous and dangerous work, long working days, few (if any) days off, and squalid conditions. So surely it stands to reason that a ruthless “employer” would work their “slaves” as hard as they can. </p>
<p>Well, not quite – or at least, not always. <a href="https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.189">Our research</a> into the business models of modern slavery in the UK explored various situations where workers were forced into working long hours with little pay. But we also came across situations where apparent slaves, especially in the agricultural sector, appeared to be given very little work to do. Sometimes, this could be no work at all for stretches of several weeks, or only a few hours or one or two days per week. </p>
<h2>Debt collectors</h2>
<p>At first this perplexed us. Why would you coerce workers into a situation of forced labour if you were not going to work them as hard as you could? And make no mistake, these were forced labourers. They were intimidated by threat or force to stay with their employers. As the United Nations agency the <a href="http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/lang--en/index.htm">International Labour Organisation</a> (ILO) <a href="http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/publications/WCMS_203832/lang--en/index.htm">puts it</a>, they were under “menace of penalty” if they tried to leave. So why were they given so little work? </p>
<p>The answer, we believe, comes from understanding the underlying business models of modern slavery. There are a variety of ways that people make money from modern slavery, and sometimes we have to go beyond the idea that it simply reduces labour costs. In the case of the underworked agricultural slaves, the business model of the companies employing them differed from how we might ordinarily understand the business of modern slavery. </p>
<p>Two features stood out in particular. First, the main way that “employers” exercised control over their workers was through debt bondage – usually instigated at the point of recruiting migrant workers overseas. As one of our informants explained: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>People [are] being told: ‘Well, you come to the UK, we’ll lend you the money, or if you get here we’ll provide you with accommodation and wages, work.’ And then when they get here they deliberately don’t give them any work to do. They say: ‘Look, in another two weeks’ time, three weeks’ time we can give you work. At the moment there’s none but don’t worry about it, you can stay in the accommodation we provided. [Here’s] a bit of money so you don’t starve, pay me back when you start getting your wages.’ So they sound very nice and reasonable, but the thing is to build up this bondage so they can’t just walk away.</p>
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<p>Second, the way that employers make money from forced labour in this situation is not just in reducing labour costs but in generating revenue from the sale of all these additional goods and services to workers under their control. Accommodation, food and transport are provided at monopoly prices to workers who have no other choices. These reap considerable rewards for employers as well as helping drive workers deeper into debt. </p>
<p>To service this debt, workers may secure funds from family members abroad or instant loan services, which enables their exploiters to generate additional revenue. In other cases, workers will merely continue to accumulate large amounts of debt, usually with undisclosed premium interest rates, that they cannot repay. Consequently, they are pushed further into financial dependence and become increasingly susceptible to continued exploitation. It becomes a cycle of debt and exploitation that is extremely difficult to break. </p>
<p>As a business model, this deviates from the norm because the employer deliberately takes on more workers than it needs for the work it expects to get. But this oversupply can be beneficial for the unscrupulous employer if it thinks of its workers as consumers (albeit consumers without a choice), as much as they are employees. The underworked agricultural “slaves” may have looked at first like an aberration. But actually they are a powerful illustration of the constant innovation in the business models of exploitation.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99863/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Crane received funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for this research. </span></em></p>There are other ways of exploiting victims in the ‘business model’ of modern slavery.Andrew Crane, Professor of Business and Society, University of BathLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/873562017-11-19T19:07:08Z2017-11-19T19:07:08ZWhy the fashion industry keeps failing to fix labour exploitation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194508/original/file-20171114-27635-7nqrtl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Four years after the Rana Plaza tragedy and there are still reports of worker exploitation in the garment industry. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Worker exploitation is rampant in the global fashion industry, according to countless <a href="https://apnews.com/e41d4976b67f4616be772b118a9cb947/Unpaid-Turkish-clothes-makers-tag-Zara-items-to-seek-help">investigations</a>, <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/04/20/follow-thread/need-supply-chain-transparency-garment-and-footwear-industry">studies</a> and <a href="https://www.oxfam.org.au/media/2017/10/poverty-the-real-cost-of-fashion-in-australia-oxfam-report/">reports</a>. So why haven’t fashion brands cleaned up their acts?</p>
<p>Even if brands want to be part of the solution (as they are frequently <a href="http://theconversation.com/bangladesh-disaster-shows-why-we-must-urgently-clean-up-global-sweat-shops-13899">asked to be</a>) they are hindered by the current legal system. The problem is if brands are to eradicate labour exploitation, they must take more control of their supply chains. But if they take more control over their supply chains, they open themselves up to the risk of tremendous legal liability.</p>
<p>To effect real change in the global fashion industry, the countries where brands are headquartered need to reconsider their legal policies. The existing liability rules need to be amended to incentivise the brands’ direct involvement in labour issues in their chains.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/global-supply-chains-link-us-all-to-shame-of-child-and-forced-labour-33593">Global supply chains link us all to shame of child and forced labour</a>
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<p>A <a href="https://www.oxfam.org.au/media/2017/10/poverty-the-real-cost-of-fashion-in-australia-oxfam-report/">recent report</a> from Oxfam found that garment workers earn as little as 2% of the price of clothing sold in Australia - a A$27 billion industry. </p>
<p>Earlier this month, shoppers at a Zara store in Istanbul <a href="https://apnews.com/e41d4976b67f4616be772b118a9cb947/Unpaid-Turkish-clothes-makers-tag-Zara-items-to-seek-help">allegedly</a> found messages in the clothing that garment workers had hidden in protest of unfair wages. The messages read “I made this item you are going to buy, but I didn’t get paid for it”.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/world/asia/report-on-bangladesh-building-collapse-finds-widespread-blame.html">Rana Plaza tragedy</a> saw more than 1,000 people killed when a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed. This occurred more than four years ago.</p>
<p>These are just a few examples from a long list of horrors. But still the problem has not been fixed.</p>
<h2>Global value chains</h2>
<p>Over the past few decades, the production process for garments (and other things) has evolved and become <a href="https://www.oecd.org/tad/gvc_report_g20_july_2014.pdf">very complicated</a>. These “<a href="https://globalvaluechains.org/concept-tools">global value chains</a>” include all the activities that are necessary to a product’s life-cycle - designing, making, selling, and sometimes even recycling.</p>
<p>When it comes to the relationship between these vast networks of suppliers and the law, there is a connection between responsibility and liability. Generally, a brand is only legally responsible for the actions of suppliers if the brand directly controls that supplier. In a global value chain, most suppliers are typically outside of the brand’s direct control.</p>
<p>Like many activist organisations, Oxfam <a href="http://whatshemakes.oxfam.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Living-Wage-Media-Report_WEB.pdf">places</a> the onus on Australian fashion brands to improve the labour practices of their subsidiaries and suppliers in developing countries.</p>
<p>For instance, Oxfam calls for brands to implement a “living wage” - a wage that is sufficient for workers to meet their basic needs. Their report estimates that enforcing a living wage will only increase the final product price by 1%. This, they suggest, could be absorbed by the chain in order to keep prices from rising.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-exactly-is-a-living-wage-86927">Explainer: what exactly is a living wage?</a>
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<p>The key is this: to ensure individual garment workers receive a living wage, brands would need to exert additional oversight and coordination of their suppliers and subsidiaries. In other words, brands would have to take stronger control not only of their suppliers but also of their suppliers’ suppliers, and their suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers, and so on. </p>
<p>This is known as chain integration. </p>
<p>And in fact, in certain respects, brands themselves are also <a href="http://ilreports.blogspot.com.au/2014/12/sobel-read-global-value-chains.html">keen to integrate their supply chains</a> but for different reasons. From the brands’ perspective, integration can help ensure production efficiency, product quality control and effective management of brand reputation.</p>
<p>In many ways then, activists and the brands want the same thing: greater chain integration.</p>
<p>What then is stopping the brands from doing so? The answer is the legal landscape that risks exposing the brands to colossal liability as a consequence of their efforts. </p>
<p>It is impossible to put an exact number on how much such liability might cost a fashion brand. But by analogy, an Australian court has ordered a domestic company to <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/work/melbourne-sex-harassment-payout-worker-kate-mathews-wins-13-million-in-personal-injury-damages/news-story/e907ad0aa910fb1cce2d74c8a921e2c9">pay over a million dollars</a> for workplace misconduct that occurred against a <em>single</em> employee. </p>
<p>So one can understand why brands might fear being liable for all the misconduct directed against <em>every</em> overseas worker in their supply chains.</p>
<h2>What will it take to create change?</h2>
<p>In this regard, brands are in something of a Catch-22. As the law currently stands (and because brands consequently limit integration), brands are rarely liable when a supplier or subsidiary in their chain commits a wrong.</p>
<p>The problem for brands is that they are likely to lose these legal defences if they proactively take control of their chains. This is true whether the control is for purposes of what they selfishly want (more efficient supply chains) or what activists want (better labour practices).</p>
<p>This dilemma played out following the 2013 Rana Plaza tragedy, when many European brands signed a <a href="http://bangladeshaccord.org">safety accord</a> that seeks to protect Bangladeshi workers from unsafe working conditions. Some American and <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/major-retailers-refuse-to-sign-bangladesh-agreement-20130516-2jnzp.html">Australian</a> fashion brands refused to sign the accord precisely because of the fear of future liability. </p>
<p>Oxfam’s estimation of a 1% price increase certainly does not account for the enormously expensive risk of litigation that brands may expose themselves to if they promise a living wage to workers.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/three-years-on-from-rana-plaza-disaster-and-little-improvement-in-transparency-or-worker-conditions-58216">Three years on from Rana Plaza disaster and little improvement in transparency or worker conditions</a>
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<p>To get brands on board with improving their supply chains and stopping worker exploitation, we must first recognise the complex landscape that brands operate in. In the current environment, it is often safer for brands to limit their involvement in labour issues, hiding behind third-party <a href="https://theconversation.com/global-laws-needed-to-safeguard-rights-of-factory-workers-14390">“monitoring” and “audits”</a>. </p>
<p>We must instead find ways to transform what are now risks of action into incentives for change. Although it is of course right to seek to hold companies responsible for labour abuses, brands must also not be punished with potential liability where they take control of their chains for the purpose of bettering the lives of workers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87356/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>While the fashion industry may want to address worker exploitation in their supply chains, it would open them up to tremendous legal liability. This needs to change.Kevin B Sobel-Read, Lecturer in Law and Anthropologist, University of NewcastleGeorgia Monaghan, Research Assistant, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/854712017-10-18T14:35:27Z2017-10-18T14:35:27ZHow the home of Robin Hood is trying to free itself of modern slavery<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190820/original/file-20171018-32367-139g405.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nottingham: no more human trafficking. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/23351536@N07/6157833189/sizes/l">kaysgeog/flickr.com</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A year after the police chief in Nottinghamshire <a href="http://www.nottinghamshire.pcc.police.uk/News-and-Events/Archived-News/2016/PR-521.aspx">committed</a> to making the county and the city of Nottingham free from slavery, a group of the region’s businesses, churches and charities have <a href="http://www.nottinghampost.com/news/nottingham-news/organisations-make-pledge-make-nottinghamshire-643148">pledged</a> to help make this a reality. </p>
<p>There are estimated to be between <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/386841/Modern_Slavery_an_application_of_MSE_revised.pdf">10,000 and 13,000</a> victims of modern slavery and human trafficking across the UK. We don’t yet fully understand how those cases are distributed around the country, but it is clear that official figures for arrests and referrals to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the government’s support framework for victims, currently only scrape the surface. In Nottinghamshire, police data shows there were 33 referrals to the NRM in 2016-17, more than double the referrals in 2015-16.</p>
<p><iframe id="utTi5" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/utTi5/1/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>Hiding in plain sight</h2>
<p>While people may be trafficked from anywhere in the world, modern slavery is also a very local issue. The recent <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-40171496">case</a> of Nottinghamshire farmer Jon Hammond is one example. During a casual conversation at an office Christmas party, one of his employees confided to another that he had been trafficked to the UK and was being exploited by his landlord. In June 2017, the landlord was <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-40291452">jailed</a> for eight years after admitting to charges of human trafficking and forced labour.</p>
<p>Slavery can be hidden in plain sight within our workplaces or neighbourhoods, a phenomenon described as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Slave_Next_Door.html?id=JZx7isZOytAC&redir_esc=y">“the slave next door”</a> by modern slavery experts Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter. </p>
<p>Patterns of exploitation are sometimes only revealed by unusual or anti-social behaviour in communities, or disclosed through established relationships built on trust. When cases emerge, it is frequently local employers, frontline staff in public services, or voluntary sector organisations that first need to recognise the problem, and signpost victims to appropriate specialised services.</p>
<p>While the government <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/home-secretary-strengthens-police-response-to-modern-slavery">announced £8.5m in 2016</a> to help enforce its national level <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/383764/Modern_Slavery_Strategy_FINAL_DEC2015.pdf">Modern Slavery Strategy</a>, there has been little local support available. </p>
<p>Despite the lack of funding, <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/collaborating-for-freedom-strengthening-anti-slavery-partnerships-registration-37385499034">research</a> that I have been working on with the office of the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner has mapped local partnerships being built by numerous police forces, local authorities, faith bodies and non-governmental organisations to tackle modern slavery around the country. </p>
<p>We’re finding that the scope and ambition of the partnerships varies widely. Often they are led by police, but officers admit they are not always best-placed to engage with the groups and individuals they need to reach. In particular, communities vulnerable to trafficking sometimes have an underlying distrust of the police.</p>
<h2>Awareness and training</h2>
<p>In Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, I have been involved in exploring how local civic leadership and community engagement can help make anti-slavery efforts more effective. Building on Bales and Soodalter’s concept of a “slavery-free city”, we have begun to encourage a broader local ownership for the anti-slavery agenda. </p>
<p>In practice this means engaging a variety of local and civic leaders to commit their organisations to raising awareness, training staff, sharing intelligence and supporting victims and survivors. Nottinghamshire’s local modern slavery partnership has already trained hundreds of staff from local public and voluntary sector organisations over the last year in how to spot the signs of slavery. </p>
<p>We are working closely with businesses and the public sector to remove modern slavery from supply chains, and are carrying out ongoing research on the risk of labour exploitation in social care. We are also exploring with local business leaders what their wider contribution to a slavery-free community might be. This could follow the example of the Co-op’s <a href="https://www.co-operative.coop/media/news-releases/co-op-provides-brighter-future-for-uk-victims-of-modern-slavery">Bright Future programme</a>, which provides employment opportunities for survivors of slavery. Long-term, we hope the public and private sector can work together to create a more resilient, slavery-free economy. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-help-survivors-of-modern-slavery-rebuild-their-lives-73941">How to help survivors of modern slavery rebuild their lives</a>
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<p>A local focus also provides the opportunity to build on different philosophical approaches to anti-slavery work. Modern slavery and human trafficking needs to be seen within the wider social and economic context, such as the effects of capitalism. Church leaders such as <a href="https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2017/19-may/news/uk/redfern-church-must-respond-to-slavery">Alastair Redfern</a>, bishop of Derby, argue that society as a whole needs to avoid what Pope Francis termed the “globalisation of indifference” and accept more responsibility for ending slavery.</p>
<p>Working in a local context we have the opportunity to support enforcement of the Modern Slavery Act, but also move beyond this by exploring with local faith groups, businesses and civil society how everyone in Nottinghamshire can respond to slavery by changing their own behaviours. In this way, local action in our communities can also have a global perspective and impact.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85471/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison Gardner has received in-kind support from the Office of the Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner to complete the research cited in this article. </span></em></p>Slavery is a local issue – and stopping it requires a local approach.Alison Gardner, Research Fellow for Slavery-Free Communities, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/829742017-09-13T02:33:05Z2017-09-13T02:33:05ZA bloody decade of the iPhone<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/184482/original/file-20170904-17292-1nx8xtk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Foxconn was nominated for the 2011 Public Eye Award, which produced this image as part of its campaign to end labour exploitation. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/greenpeace_switzerland/5354250483">Greenpeace Switzerland/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/shortcodes/images-videos/articles-democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
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<p>Ten years ago the <a href="https://www.wired.com/2009/06/dayintech_0629/">first iPhone</a> went on sale. The iconic product not only profoundly altered the world of gadgets, but also of consumption and tall corporate profit; this world would be impossible without the toiling of millions along the assembly line.</p>
<p>I look back at the first ten years of the iPhone and see a bloody decade of labour abuse, especially in Chinese factories such as those run by <a href="http://www.foxconn.com/GroupProfile_En/GroupProfile.html">Foxconn</a>, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. At one <a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/77shx5qp9780252040627.html">point</a> Foxconn had more employees in China than the US armed forces combined.</p>
<p>Foxconn makes most of its money from assembling iPhones, iPads, iMacs and iPods. Its notorious “<a href="https://www.somo.nl/workers-as-machines-military-management-in-foxconn/">military management</a>” was blamed for causing a string of 17 worker suicides in 2010. </p>
<p>The company tried so hard to stop the suicides, not by digging out the roots of exploitation, but by erecting “<a href="https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2010/08/03/foxconn-installs-antijumping-nets-at-hebei-plants/">anti-jumping nets</a>” atop its buildings. Never before has a modern factory hidden behind such suicide-prevention netting, which last appeared on transatlantic slave ships centuries ago.</p>
<p>Foxconn is only one part of the Apple empire. The long and complicated supply chain has caused innumerable work injuries, occupational diseases and premature deaths over the past decade. </p>
<p>To date, Apple does not offer a full account for the total damage of victimised lives. The number must be many, many thousands if we include all Apple suppliers. And yet factories like Foxconn often enjoy immunity, sometimes taking no responsibility at all.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Readers unfamiliar with the dark reality behind the iPhone need only watch Complicit.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>To make a living, workers must break the law</h2>
<p>Apple continues to put out <a href="https://images.apple.com/au/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Progress-Report-2017.pdf">bogus claims</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Products made to have a positive impact. On the world and the people who make them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The company claims to hold its suppliers accountable “to the highest standards”.</p>
<p>In reality, corporate practices in the making of the iPhone are substandard when held up against either <a href="http://www.chinalawblog.com/2014/08/chinas-forty-hour-work-week-is-mandatory-except-when-its-not-part-iii.html">Chinese labour regulations</a> or ethical smartphone companies such as <a href="https://www.fairphone.com/en/">Fairphone</a>. Apple’s standards for their workers are anything but “the highest”.</p>
<p>Wages remain low. <a href="http://sacom.hk/">Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour</a> calculate that the living wage for an iPhone worker in Shenzhen, China, should be about $650 per month. But to earn this amount today, an average worker would need to pull off 80-90 hours of overtime every month – that’s more than double the legal cap of 36 hours. </p>
<p>In other words, to make a living, workers have no choice but to break Chinese law.</p>
<p>Back in 2012, Apple <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-foxconn-idUSBRE82S19720120329">vowed</a> to work with Foxconn to bring the amount of overtime down to no more than 49 hours a week. It later broke its promise and retreated to adopt the <a href="http://www.eiccoalition.org/media/docs/EICCCodeofConduct5_English.pdf">Electronic Industry Code of Conduct</a> (EICC), which stipulates “no more than 60 hours a week”. </p>
<p>The EICC standard is 25% lower than the Chinese legal threshold. So why did Apple opt for a less-than-legal code of conduct in the Chinese context over a higher standard? Tim Cook owes us an explanation.</p>
<p>Even with the EICC, workers refusing to do excessive overtime at the current wage level simply won’t be able to make ends meet. The only way for workers to earn a livelihood without doing an illegal amount of overtime, and without compromising their physical, mental and social health, is for Apple and their suppliers to raise basic wages.</p>
<h2>Is there real progress behind the progress reports?</h2>
<p>Apple also brags about its training programs. According to its <a href="https://images.apple.com/au/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Progress-Report-2017.pdf">2017 Supplier Responsibility Progress Report</a>, the company partnered with its suppliers to train more than 2.4 million workers on their rights as employees. One basic right is for workers to unionise. </p>
<p>However, those at Foxconn are stuck with a management-run <a href="http://sacom.hk/statement-foxconn-should-keep-its-promise-we-need-no-fake-trade-unions/">fake union</a> that is ineffective and fooling no one.</p>
<p>If Apple is serious about its words, it should let workers know about their rights to genuine union representation and use its influence to let workers exercise this right. Unfortunately, no such thing has occurred in the past ten years. Will it happen in the next ten?</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183591/original/file-20170828-1549-1kk4oyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183591/original/file-20170828-1549-1kk4oyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183591/original/file-20170828-1549-1kk4oyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183591/original/file-20170828-1549-1kk4oyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183591/original/file-20170828-1549-1kk4oyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183591/original/file-20170828-1549-1kk4oyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/183591/original/file-20170828-1549-1kk4oyc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=494&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Apple’s standards for their workers are anything but ‘the highest’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Annette Bernhardt/flickr</span></span>
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<p>Considering that Apple has recently backed out from the <a href="http://www.fairlabor.org/">Fair Labor Association</a>, a third-party auditor of corporate social responsibility (CSR), I’m sceptical. The FLA is not exactly “the highest standard” in labour-related auditing to begin with. But Apple no longer even bothers to ask it to assess supplier working conditions.</p>
<p>Despite this regressive move, Apple declared in its annual CSR <a href="https://images.apple.com/au/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Progress-Report-2017.pdf">report</a> that it “continue(s) to partner with independent third-party auditors”.</p>
<p>The glossy report offers no information on who the auditors actually are, and how their independence is guaranteed. This is fairly inconsistent with Apple’s claim to be <a href="http://images.apple.com/br/supplier-responsibility/pdf/apple_named_top_manufacturer.pdf">the most transparent of IT companies</a>.</p>
<p>What then, are “the highest standards”? The least Apple can do is to let international trade union federations audit Foxconn and other suppliers to ensure their workers are not mistreated. If Apple and Foxconn are so proud of what they have done for workers, why would they be afraid?</p>
<p>Apple should also stop pretending it doesn’t know about <a href="https://www.fairphone.com/en/">Fairphone</a>, the <a href="https://www.lovieawards.eu/sv/press/press-releases/the-6th-annual-lovie-award-winners-announced/">Lovie Award</a>-winning Dutch smartphone firm that was Europe’s “<a href="https://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/31/tech5-netherlands-fairphone-named-the-netherlands-fastest-growing-tech-startup/#.tnw_hvsJq6SB">fastest-growing tech startup</a>” in 2015. </p>
<p>Fairphone, with its modular design, information transparency and worker welfare fund, has brought revolutionary change to the ethical design, manufacture and recycling of smartphones, setting a truly new standard for the likes of Apple.</p>
<p>Last August, I visited <a href="http://www.hi-p.com/index.php?c=article&a=type&tid=87">Hi-P</a>, a factory in Suzhou, eastern China, that assembles Fairphones. Hi-P also happens to be a supplier for Apple. According to a worker I spoke to, she and her colleagues preferred to make Fairphones because the job was less demanding and more generously remunerated.</p>
<p>“It’s much harder working for Apple. They are so stingy,” the assembly-line worker in her late 30s told me. “Our managers asked them [Apple] to give us similar bonuses [as we received from Fairphone]. They tried again and again, but ended up getting nothing even close.”</p>
<p>If an ordinary worker can plainly demonstrate that Apple does not, in fact, have the “highest standards”, surely it’s time the company stopped pleading ignorance or innocence of its labour abuse. </p>
<p>There’s no excuse for Apple’s first bloody decade of the iPhone. And even less so for its next ten years.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Jack Linchuan Qiu’s book, <a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/77shx5qp9780252040627.html">Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition</a>, is available from The University of Illinois Press.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82974/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jack Linchuan Qiu receives funding from the General Research Fund of Hong Kong SAR Government. He is also a board member of Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour.</span></em></p>The first ten years of the iPhone has been a bloody decade of labour abuse, especially in Chinese factories such as those run by Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer.Jack Linchuan Qiu, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong KongLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/733482017-03-01T03:51:45Z2017-03-01T03:51:45ZWe need to hear the stories of exploited unlawful migrant workers, not just deport them<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158667/original/image-20170228-29936-oparoh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There is no transparency in how the Australian Border Force operates when it comes to deporting illegal migrant workers.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP/Julian Smith</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Migration status – even for those with the right to work in Australia – is often used as leverage to exploit workers. This is evident from my <a href="http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/thebordercrossingobservatory/research-agenda/trafficking-and-labour-exploitation/illegal-workers/">ongoing research</a>, <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022185615600510">other research</a> and <a href="http://economicdevelopment.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/1390111/IRV-Inquiry-Final-Report-.pdf">government inquiries</a>. So, if the <a href="https://www.employment.gov.au/migrant-workers-taskforce">Migrant Workers Taskforce’s</a> commitment to stamp out exploitation is genuine, then the first step must be to remove this leverage.</p>
<p>As such, Australia needs to empower migrant workers to report abuse, and more effectively punish employers that do the wrong thing. The taskforce has <a href="https://www.employment.gov.au/chairs-public-statement-february-2017">stated</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For any temporary visa holder who has no work entitlement attached to their visa, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection will make no commitment other than to consider the case on its merits.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A case-by-case commitment to consider whether or not someone will be deported when they report exploitation, if they came to Australia without the right to work as part of their visa conditions and/or if they have overstayed their visa, is as good as no commitment. It provides no certainty, and therefore ensures unlawful workers remain unprotected.</p>
<p>Expecting workers to tell Department of Immigration and Fair Work officials about their situation is based on an assumption that this is in their interest. </p>
<p>My <a href="http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/thebordercrossingobservatory/research-agenda/trafficking-and-labour-exploitation/illegal-workers/">interview-based research</a> with workers, employers, contractors and other stakeholders is examining issues related to unlawful migrant labour across different industries in Victoria and New South Wales. Workers and those who support them – who are often people who have also worked unlawfully at some stage – repeatedly tell me that the familial and community entanglement of unlawful workers with contractors is one of the many reasons that it is rarely in the worker’s interest to report exploitation. </p>
<p>There is also a strong desire to work. This means people accept substandard work and other conditions (such as accommodation) because their primary goal is earning money. If they complain, they will easily be replaced. </p>
<p>In the absence of any guarantee of not being deported and no guarantee that remuneration or compensation can be sought, reporting exploitation offers very little to this group of workers. </p>
<h2>What do we know about the problem?</h2>
<p>The taskforce’s recent <a href="https://www.employment.gov.au/chairs-public-statement-february-2017">progress update</a> provides some good signs. These include new protections for those who have work rights but breach them. This was the case for <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2015/7-eleven-revealed/">many of the 7-Eleven workers</a> who had student visas but worked more hours than these allowed, and so were in breach of their visa conditions.</p>
<p>As the taskforce progresses, the challenge will be to tackle the difficult and complex terrain of improving employment conditions, managing the overlap of exploitation and unlawful migration status, while also recognising the challenges for employers in different industries and developing enduring and impactful solutions.</p>
<p>What we do know is:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>It has previously <a href="https://www.border.gov.au/ReportsandPublications/Documents/government-response/howells_report.pdf">been estimated</a> that “the total numbers of non-citizens working in Australia when they do not have permission … must be in the order of 50,000 [and up to approximately] 100,000 non-citizens”.</p></li>
<li><p>We identify very few of these workers. In 2015-16 the number of unlawful non-citizens identified <a href="https://www.border.gov.au/about/reports-publications/research-statistics/statistics/year-at-a-glance/2015-16">was 15,145</a> and the number of unlawful non-citizen workers was 1,970. There is no publicly available data on whether any of these people were also identified as potentially exploited workers.</p></li>
<li><p>Part of the ABF’s compliance role is to identify, detain and deport unlawful migrant workers. When these operations take place, the ABF <a href="http://newsroom.border.gov.au/releases/abf-targets-illegal-worker-operation-in-wa">often publicises them</a> and/or <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/wa-news/illegal-workers-detained-at-wa-farm-following-border-force-raids-20161104-gsikyr.html">the media report</a> them.</p></li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/CICrimJust/2010/16.pdf">Researchers</a> and <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-28/salvos-warn-human-trafficking-agworkers-is-rife/6651322">civil society</a> have consistently raised concerns that unlawful workers who have been exploited are being deported because of their migration status without their exploitation being recognised.</p>
<p>In 2015-16, the Australian Federal Police received <a href="https://www.ag.gov.au/CrimeAndCorruption/HumanTrafficking/Documents/Report-of-the-interdepartmental-committee-on-human-trafficking-and-slavery-july-2015-to-June-2016.pdf">75 referrals</a> related to workplace exploitation that were suspected to amount to human trafficking or a related offence under Commonwealth law. Of these, 39 related to sexual exploitation; the rest related to other forms of labour exploitation. </p>
<p>However, identifying how many of these referrals came from the ABF is difficult, as these data are not published. Critically, this is only a fraction of the number of unlawful non-citizens identified as working unlawfully. And there is no reporting on whether other potential cases of exploitation are ever referred to the Fair Work Ombudsman if they do not meet the standard of a potential human trafficking case.</p>
<p>Finally, in this area it is often claimed that illegal workers are taking the jobs and the livelihoods of Australians. Most recently, this claim was made by the assistant immigration minister and now employment minister, Michaelia Cash. She <a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/australia/raid-nabs-foreign-building-workers-ng-ya-205000">argued that</a> that unlawful workers are:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>… taking much-needed jobs that should be going to Australians. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reality is that some sectors of key industries <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Education_and_Employment/temporary_work_visa/Report">rely on</a> low-paid and, in some instances, unlawful migrant workers. In my research I am being told consistently that, for some industries, this group of workers is the most reliable and efficient – and if there was a way to make them lawful the industry would continue to hire them. </p>
<p>If our commitment is to ensuring the integrity of the workforce and of our employment system, we must begin with protecting anyone who is working in Australia and recognising the challenges of specific industries. The introduction of <a href="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/ems/r5826_ems_e0207b3c-41de-45b8-9631-4d08f9f88e23/upload_pdf/622141.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf">a bill</a> goes one step towards protection, but it fails to tackle the unequal treatment of those without the right to work in Australia.</p>
<p>Exploitation is not tackled by protecting only some of those who are exploited.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73348/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marie Segrave receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Australia needs to empower migrant workers to report abuse, and more effectively punish employers that do the wrong thing.Marie Segrave, Associate Professor, Criminology, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/629612016-07-27T04:18:52Z2016-07-27T04:18:52ZWhy we’re making no progress tackling the exploitation of migrant workers<p>On Tuesday night, <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/news/insight/tvepisode/fair-work-fair-pay">SBS’ Insight program</a> aired concerns about temporary migrant labour exploitation. These issues tend to come to national attention when a <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/7-eleven">particular case is exposed</a>, but mostly they are not seen as national priorities – and, as such, the response is generally reactive rather than proactive.</p>
<p>The exploitation to have attracted attention most recently often involves student-visa holders, <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2015/05/04/4227055.htm">working-holiday-visa holders</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/evidence-of-employers-misusing-457-visas-shows-need-for-reform-41443">457-visa holders</a>.</p>
<p>Just a little under ten years ago, many of these situations would more immediately have been framed as issues of <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-06-15/costello---labour-trafficking2c-not-sex-trafficking-needs-more/2758200">labour trafficking</a>. But, since then, there has been a shift away from identifying and responding to these cases as potential slavery or trafficking offences, and instead focusing on labour exploitation as an issue for the Fair Work Ombudsman to review and/or redress. </p>
<h2>The problems with purely pursuing employers</h2>
<p>The current focus in tackling temporary migrant labour exploitation is workplace breaches. This involves the pursuit of employers who have paid below the minimum rate or breached working conditions in other ways to achieve outcomes such as financial reparation for employees and, potentially, to fine employers.</p>
<p>There are a number of concerns to be raised here.</p>
<p>First, while it <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Education_and_Employment/temporary_work_visa/Report">has been recommended</a> that the Fair Work Ombudsman has no responsibility to report on migration status to the Department of Immigration, for many workers their migration status is a significant concern and obstacle to reporting exploitative conditions. </p>
<p>Such conditions and fears include non-payment, significant wage deduction, being forced to work in breach of visa conditions and experiencing a range of threats, intimidation and/or abuse. An example is student-visa holders being required to work for more hours than they are entitled with the threat of being fired if they don’t complete the hours. </p>
<p>And the threat of being reported to the department, even for those whose work status is legal, has been identified as a significant obstacle to reporting employer exploitation. There is a concern that migration status, particularly for those who are working in breach of visa conditions, is an obstacle to making contact or working with the Fair Work Ombudsman.</p>
<p>The fear of deportation and/or the inability to find alternative employment is significant. This is the case for many reasons, including but not limited to the shame of returning home, fear of retribution from the employer, or the significant debts incurred to get to Australia. </p>
<p>We need to understand the vulnerabilities of workers who have been exploited, and to create a system that supports workers – regardless of their migration status. The current response is not focused on preventing exploitation but responding to it, and is not well-designed to respond to the complex issues that impact workers coming forward in the first instance. </p>
<p>The second concern is the distinction between cases referred to the Fair Work Ombudsman and cases referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) for criminal investigation, and why there is no overlap.</p>
<p>The AFP currently has no process for referring a case they are dealing with to the Fair Work Ombudsman to enable the pursuit of remuneration and/or compensation. Similarly, there is no formal process for referring cases to the AFP. It is unclear why this is not happening.</p>
<p>In the course of my research involving interviews with stakeholders, authorities and migrant workers, it has been made clear that some of the cases related to the 7-Eleven scandal have included situations where individuals had passports confiscated, were forced to work in breach of student visa conditions and were living in accommodation controlled by their employer.</p>
<p>It seems none of the 7-Eleven cases raised so far have been investigated by the AFP as possible offences under the slavery or slavery-like practices legislation. Yet the cases that have come to light have clear and direct overlap with the relevant Criminal Code.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131905/original/image-20160726-24908-1hm8309.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/131905/original/image-20160726-24908-1hm8309.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131905/original/image-20160726-24908-1hm8309.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131905/original/image-20160726-24908-1hm8309.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131905/original/image-20160726-24908-1hm8309.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131905/original/image-20160726-24908-1hm8309.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/131905/original/image-20160726-24908-1hm8309.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">None of the cases arising out of the 7-Eleven scandal have been reported or discussed with the AFP.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">fridy/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>It’s trafficking, too</h2>
<p>Human trafficking is tackled as an issue of criminal exploitation. This requires AFP involvement to determine whether there is a <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/Series/C2004A04868">potential criminal offence</a> and the transfer onto the government-funded, <a href="http://www.redcross.org.au/support-for-trafficked-people.aspx">Red Cross-provided Support for Trafficking People</a> package (if required/desired by the victim/witness). This process is solely focused on criminal matters as an outcome, in addition to welfare and support provisions for victims.</p>
<p>There is no automatic or supported process to enable access to remuneration or compensation. All civil matters are outside of this process. </p>
<p>Civil compensation in trafficking cases <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/sex-slave-victim-wins-abuse-claim/2007/05/28/1180205160434.html">has been sought</a>. But it is clear this process is piecemeal and pursued purely on a case-by-case basis.</p>
<p>Australia has pursued <a href="https://www.cdpp.gov.au/case-reports/filter?field_category_tid=15">very few trafficking-related charges</a>. This creates a vacuum of legal precedence in the area of human trafficking, reproducing a false notion that Australia remains a nation where such practices are relatively uncommon. </p>
<p>The absence of transparency regarding the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions decisions not to pursue trafficking cases referred to it via the AFP, other than to note the <a href="http://www.news.com.au/national/australias-human-trafficking-crisis-forced-marriage-labour-exploitation-are-rising/news-story/9e9fae0181034b65860bd3b03d8c7455">limitations of the evidence</a>, creates a significant obstacle to understanding how best we can pursue prosecutions under these laws. </p>
<p>There is an opportunity to review how we respond across all forms of temporary migrant labour exploitation – regardless of the victim’s migration status – to ensure both criminal charges and civil and administrative remedies are pursued. </p>
<p>This will allow us to better understand the breadth of exploitation that is occurring in the dark places across many industries, and to better redress the conditions that create and sustain exploitative practices.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62961/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marie Segrave is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow (Unlawful temporary migration labour: regulation, exploitation and vulnerability, 2014-2018). Marie leads the Trafficking and Labour Exploitation research agenda at the Border Observatory (<a href="http://www.borderobservatory.org">www.borderobservatory.org</a>)</span></em></p>The primary focus in tackling temporary migrant labour exploitation is workplace breaches. But should it be?Marie Segrave, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/547232016-02-17T04:15:35Z2016-02-17T04:15:35ZUK companies poised to act on forced labour, but Australia lags behind<p>What are we doing to encourage companies to address labour abuses in their supply chains?</p>
<p>There’s a flurry of activity in the UK at present as companies and civil society gear up for the supply chain transparency provision in the Modern Slavery Act to kick in. From 1 April, companies carrying on a business in the UK with an total annual turnover of £36 million or more must report on steps they are taking to ensure that slavery, forced labour and human trafficking is not taking place in their own businesses or in their supply chains. Around 12,000 companies will be caught by this new rule.</p>
<p>The UK Act reflects growing global recognition of the problem of forced labour and other forms of labour exploitation in supply chains and the need to take action. The <a href="http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm">International Labour Organisation</a> reports that there are almost 21 million people worldwide trapped in forced labour alone. Some 19 million are in the private sector, with illicit profits totalling US$150 billion annually.</p>
<p>As regulatory measures go, the UK transparency rule is very light touch. Companies are required to produce a Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement for each financial year. This statement must be approved by the board of directors and signed by a director. It must be available via a prominent link on the company’s homepage. The British government has produced <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/471996/Transparency_in_Supply_Chains_etc__A_practical_guide__final_.pdf">guidance</a> on what companies might include in such a statement. But ultimately a company can comply by producing a statement saying it is doing nothing.</p>
<p>The measure relies on civil society doing the legwork to drive improvements through naming and shaming and benchmarking. It also relies on consumers and investors using the information made available to them to make more informed decisions and drive change.</p>
<p>Even as a transparency tool, it has issues. There is no single reporting format, and companies are not required to post their statements in a single repository. Civil society has to compile all the data, as well as analyse and publicise it.</p>
<p>But it’s a step in the right direction. The rule is inspired by the Californian Transparency in Supply Chains Act. This pioneering regulation also has its deficiencies, not least of which is a high level of <a href="http://www.developmentinternational.org/#!trafficking-slavery/zqhg7">non-compliance</a>. But it has had a positive impact. </p>
<p>As pointed out by <a href="http://pripodcasts.libsyn.com/the-uk-modern-slavery-act">Phil Bloomer, Executive Director of the Human Rights Resource Centre</a>, well-known brands such as Hyundai, Caterpillar and Krispy Kreme have found themselves in the spotlight for reporting that they were taking no action. Other companies have used the mechanism to detail improvements in their approach to labour and human rights risks in their supply chains. </p>
<p>Apple, for example, has worked with NGO Verité to respond to findings that workers in its supply chain were being charged high recruitment fees leading to debt bondage by seeking to eliminate the practice and to reimburse workers. At the very least, this law had compelled many companies to think about and account for what they are doing (or not doing). It has also helped create increased corporate, investor and consumer awareness.</p>
<p>Of course, this isn’t an issue that is only faced by those on the other side of the world. The Asia Pacific region has 56% (11.7 million) of the global total number of forced labourers. Revelations of serious labour exploitation within the Australian and global supply chains of major Australian companies are increasingly frequent. This includes clothing, consumer electronics, sporting goods, agriculture and seafood. The sale by Coles, Woolworths and Aldi of Thai seafood products made using forced and child labour is just one recent example.</p>
<p>So what is Australia doing?</p>
<p>The Australian Government’s National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking and Slavery 2015–19 includes a multi-stakeholder Supply Chains Working Group. This <a href="https://theconversation.com/global-supply-chains-link-us-all-to-shame-of-child-and-forced-labour-33593">Working Group</a>, established in 2014, is tasked with examining strategies to address serious labour exploitation in the supply chains of goods and services.</p>
<p>Some Australian businesses are taking action. Research shows, however, that many aren’t. <a href="https://www.baptistworldaid.org.au/assets/BehindtheBarcode/Electronics-Industry-Trends-Report-Australia.pdf">A recent study</a> of supply chain management in the electronics industry found that Australian brands were among the worst performers when it comes to managing risks of labour exploitation. </p>
<p>A similar <a href="http://www.baptistworldaid.org.au/assets/Be-Fair-Section/FashionReport.pdf">study</a> into the Australian fashion industry found that more than 75% of those included in the research did not know where their cotton, fabrics and inputs were sourced from. </p>
<p>A December 2015 report co-authored by the <a href="https://www.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publication/2015_AHRC_ACCSR_HR_in_supply_chains_0.pdf">Australian Human Rights Commission</a> found that many Australian businesses that engage with human rights issues still tend to focus their efforts on areas in which they have direct operational control. They lack clear strategies and processes to identify, manage and respond to human rights risks in their supply chains.</p>
<p>Last but not least we have NGOs, networks and research centres doing immensely valuable work in this area. But as legislatures in other countries have recognised, civil society can’t do this on its own. Government needs to act.</p>
<p>We could start with something like they’re doing in the UK. Or we could even do better.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/54723/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ingrid Landau has previously worked on projects funded by the Australian Research Council, the International Labour Organisation and the Fair Work Commission.</span></em></p>The UK’s Modern Slavery Act will push companies to act on forced labour, but Australia needs to follow this lead.Ingrid Landau, PhD Candidate and Research Fellow, Centre for Employment and Labour Relations Law, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.