Been

a Nad

eem

Glo

bal R

epor

ter |

Gre

at B

ritai

n

ToxicDid you know by upgrading your latest phone you could be fueling a civil war in Congo? By drinking the coffee you do, you could be contributing to the enslavement of children in the Cote D’Ivoire, while the catwalk collections of Milan, Paris and London only eclipse the degradation and human right violations in the sweatshops of India.

Some of the worse human rights violations – such as child labor and enforced slavery still exist in the world, and what’s more – much of it is fueled by our need to consume.

The

High StreetTOXIC

-Global Reporter- Beena Ham-mond, Great Britain

TOXIC

According to Global Slavery Index,

it is estimated that 36 million people

worldwide are trapped in modern day

slavery. In terms of absolute numbers,

India remains top of the list with an

estimated 14.29 million enslaved

people, followed by China (3.24m),

then Pakistan (2.06m), newcomer

Uzbekistan (1.2m,), and Russia

(1.05m): together total 61% of those in

modern slavery.Many of those enslaved include

children working in coffee plantations,

through to mines to extract materials

used in our smartphones. And what’s

more, much of our consumption is

funded by debt. In the UK alone – a

country of 64 million people, the UK

Cards Association revealed spending

in 2005 increasing from £270 billion to

£566 billion in 2014.Under the United Nations Framework

for Business and Human Rights, all

businesses have a responsibility to

respect, protect and remedy the human

rights of individuals and communities

impacted by their operations. In

practice, this translates to little more

than an unregulated farce as companies

continue to violate something that is

next to impossible to police.

"36 million people worldwide are trapped in modern day slavery"

3ROLFLQJ� EHFRPHV� GLI¿FXOW� DV� VXSSO\�chains get blurred as products become more complex in their creation. Add poor monitoring to this, which means accountability gets lost. It is this that leaves people susceptible to exploitation. When no responsibility is taken to protect workers’ rights, there’s nothing to ensure items can be traced back to ethical sources. Even when multinationals like Apple come clean: In 2014 it admitted to using slave and child labour in 451 of its Chinese factories – there are plenty of others to take its place.

In 2012, China’s human rights NGO, Labour Watch, released a report, which widely showed the use of child labourers under the age of 14 for a company, which ultimately supplies Samsung. In 2015, the Financial Times newspaper reported that in South Korea, suicides, deaths and illnesses linked to Samsung factories sparked protests outside its headquarters in Seoul. Samsung is one of thousands.

And we may know a little about their plight. We know about the garment workers in sweatshops. We possibly knew about Apple. Yet consumerism remains a conundrum. Brands give us kudos. They become aspirational – endorsed by models, footballers and pop stars: we can be taken on a journey of apotheosis, where cars FDQ� ¿OO� D� VSLULWXDO� YRLG� DQG� SHUIXPHV�make us unbelievably alluring. Our smartphones become extensions of our personalities: those with an iPhone and those without.

Child Labour in Bangladesh

"Almost everyone has a mobile phone but most consumers don't know that a key component in the manufacturing of mobile phones is tantalum: an element that is mined in the Congo, where there is civil war. Revenues derived from that … end up funding weapons for rebel groups. So our consumption indirectly supports war," says Professor Manfred Lenzen, Director of the Integrated Sustainability Analysis Research Group (ISA) at the University of Sydney's School of Physics.

It is in fact these mines, which have constant abuses, child labour and human rights violations where children often suffocate or die of exhaustion. Congo is just one example – but there are plenty of others – such as Gold mining in Mali, where safety is never paramount. Just last month seven workers

died in a landslide at an open mine at a Katanga mining company for copper and cobalt. The company is 75 per cent owned by Swiss mining giant Glencore.

Then there’s fashion. As we once a year coo over the latest cutting-edge collections, which hide the grim reality facing the people who make the clothes on our high streets. In sweatshops across the globe, notably Cambodia, India and Thailand, millions of garment workers, mainly women, struggle to survive on poverty wages and provide for their children. They are forced to work 14-hour days in appalling conditions. And as the spotlight is on some following major disasters such as the one three years ago: the deadly Rana Plaza collapse that killed over 1,100 garment workers who were sewing clothes for Benetton, Primark, Matalan, Mango and others. It took heavy international pressure before these companies set up the Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund and only recently met its $30 million to provide compensation to victims and their families. Then in December last year, a court ordered the arrest of 24 people and the seizure of their assets after they failed to turn up to face murder charges.

Child Labour in Bangladesh

Rana Plaza Pre-Collapse

Rana Plaza Post-Collapse

Trapped in the Rubble

Thulsi Narayanasamy, international programme RI¿FHU� DW� FKDULW\� µ:DU� RQ�Want’, describes a recent visit to Bangladesh: “I met with female garment workers who want unions but are often reported as being verbally and physically harassed by gangs of men employed by factories to intimidate them after their shifts”.

She adds: “Of course, there are existing national and international laws – more accountability and so on, but they are not enforced. &RPSDQLHV� ÀRXW� WKHVH� ZLWK�LPSXQLW\�� SUR¿WV� GLFWDWH� RYHU�PRUDOLW\�DQG�SUR¿W�PDUJLQV�DUH�created through exploitation. There is no decent living wage, decent working environments, safe conditions, schooling rights and conditions for these people.”

The lives of people continue to be jeopardized according to the Clean Clothes Campaign, which recently reported continued safety violations in Indian

factories making clothes for JC Penny, Walmart and Marks and Spencer. While members of a non-government regulated unions were recently sacked in Shenzen, China and in Japan workers in a Mizuno factory were sacked for demonstrating for a better wage.

Perhaps one of the worst assaults on children came from Thailand. The industry that produces our counterfeit handbags is a multibillion-pound business, according to Dana Thomas, the author of

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. Thomas spends most of her time investigating the counterfeit culture of handbags and other designer goods; she has also investigated the world counterfeit market as a whole and estimates it is worth about $600 billion. This trade is known for using mostly slave labour, often children, DQG� WKH� SUR¿WV� DUH� RIWHQ�used to support all kinds of criminal ventures.

She quotes a story she saw during a Thai police raid, which used small children to make fake designer handbags for Western consumers. The owners became so vexed with constant pleas from the children to go and play outside that they broke the children’s legs and then tied them to their thighs so that they would never heal again, ensuring that the children would never walk again.

Yet we continue to waste. According to UK children’s charity Barnardo’s recent survey of 1,500 UK women, it found the majority wore only a piece of clothing three times before discarding it. Cheap high street clothes, produced in slave labour conditions, mean few get recycled. Most end up DV� UDJV� IRU� PDWWUHVV� VWXI¿QJ��The UK exports more used clothing to developing world markets —$481m or roughly 351m kilograms worth in 2014 according to United Nations statistics division, than any other country besides the US.

Over Easter, no doubt many of us have seen a glut of chocolate eggs. Sadly, the children used

to harvest the coco beans are often younger than the kids who end up eating it. Much chocolate has been painfully produced using child slave labour. Child labourers in Cote d’Ivoire are kept off school as their families need help on the farms. They routinely work 12-hour days, to supply companies, which purchase coco from the region. Many of these kids are abducted from poor countries such as Mali: Some are sold by poverty stricken families for as little as �����$�ODZVXLW�¿OHG�LQ�2FWREHU�2015 against The Hershey Company, Nestlé, and Mars inc., alleges that some of the world’s largest chocolate makers are knowingly using child labour in Africa.

The American chocolate industry has long been accused of such offenses, and a recent lawsuit demanding not only damages but also plaintiffs also want packaging of the chocolate to mention that child slaves were involved. All three lawsuits, ¿OHG� E\� ODZ\HUV� +DJHQ¶V�Berman Sobol Shapiro, claim the candy giants "turn a blind eye" to human rights abuses by cocoa suppliers in West Africa, while falsely portraying themselves as socially and ethically responsible.

The lawsuit cites an ongoing Tulane University Study, ¿QDQFHG�E\�WKH�86�'HSDUWPHQW�of Labor, which estimates more than 4,000 children are forced to produce cocoa on Ivory Coast plantations.

Factory Workers / Japan

Then there’s the beloved accompaniment to chocolate which our high streets are crammed with. Our relationship with coffee drinking is almost obsessive. Yet many of us are unaware that the beans can be extracted under conditions of forced child enslavement. Two of the world’s biggest coffee companies, Nestle and Jacobs Douwe Egberts admit that the beans they use from their Brazilian plantations may have used slave labour, according to research centre Danwatch. In its recent report, Bitter Coffee, Danwatch says the people involved in producing the beans are said to work for little or no pay and forced to live on rubbish heaps and drink water alongside animals.

Brazil is the biggest exporter of coffee accounting for one third of the global market. It is here where the supply chains become the most abstruse. But it begs the question, if some coffee are labelled Fair Trade, and supply chains can be traced as ethical, why can’t others?

The likes of Starbucks and Illy – which also source beans from Brazil – have said they know the names of all their supplies, meaning they can avoid “blacklisted” plantations.

Nestlé, has also been in the spotlight again, this time in November 2015 for producing cat food using ingredients sourced from slaves: namely seafood sourced from Thailand. Since then, it has introduced a tractability programme but has yet to report on its impact or set goals for reducing the impact.

A Fishing Village in Thailand

A Fishing Village in Thailand

In October 2015, the European Commission threatened to effectively ban imports of ¿VKHULHV¶� SURGXFWV� IURP� 7KDLODQG� XQOHVV�things were cleaned up. Testimonials from survivors, which appeared in a Guardian investigation in the summer of 2015 which revealed the dismal exploitation of thousands of stateless Rohingya boat people. Here girls where being continuously raped upon vessels crammed with slave labourers.

It is unlikely that our demand for products will diminish, whether they are ethically produced or not. What we should highlight are those pioneers. Those organisations, which outside Fair Trade, are striving to create ethical consumables outside of all the odds.

For consumables like smartphones, it is JRLQJ� WR�EH�PXFK�PRUH�GLI¿FXOW� WKDQ�VD\��clothing. Though, bear in mind, even in those factories where checks are made – those factories may outsource work to non-ethical factories were child labor is rife, especially in times of high demand. Still, accountability and more so, the spotlight has been shone on these organizations for longer meaning many high street retailers have had to make more ethical decisions about their supply chains.

For smartphones though, which use around 15, 000 components produced in different factories around the world and using 40 different minerals which can be mined in areas rife with armed groups who control the mines – things are that little bit harder.

Common Example of Child Labour

Stepping forward is the innovative Dutch mobile

phone company Fairphone, which is working towards

EHFRPLQJ�WKH�¿UVW�WR�

FUHDWH�HWKLFDO�VPDUWS

KRQHV��,WV�

supply chains cover the mines of DR Congo to the

treatment of workers in the factories of China.

Legislation has attempted to address these ethical

issues in recent years. For example, the 2010 US

Congress passed a landmark law known as Section

1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and

Consumer Protection Act, which requires all US-

listed companies that source from the DR Congo to

GHWHUPLQH�LI�WKHLU�SXUF

KDVHV�EHQH¿WHG�DUPH

G�JURXSV��

There is similar legislation in East Africa, while the

European Parliament recently voted in favour of a

new law that requires European companies to source

materials responsibly. China also recently issued due

diligence guidelines for mineral supply chains. Yet

unsurprisingly problems still persist.

“If we can change the way consumerism is now, and

consumption in general , that is where the big gain is.”

“If we can change the way consumerism is now, and

consumption in general , that is where the big gain is.”

A report by Global Witness and Amnesty International published in April 2015 said that out of 100 companies sourcing minerals form the DR Congo, 79 failed to report their supply chains properly. On top of all of this, audits are patchy.

In an interview with Quartz magazine, CEO of Fairphone, said: “The biggest impact we would like to have is creating change in economic thinking and I believe it starts with how consumers think. If we can change the way consumerism is now, and consumption in general, that is where the big gain is.”