Freedom 101
Products of Slavery
You can read the short transcript instead.
- Slavery has been linked to the supply chains of many everyday products and commodities, including shoes, electronics, cocoa, and cotton.
- Nestle, Mars and Hershey all source cocoa from West Africa, where cases of child labour and forced labour have been discovered, and still persist.
- Modern slavery is connected to crisps, ice cream and lipstick through palm oil. The palm oil industry employs 3.5 million people. Many are promised high-paying work in another country, only to suffer conditions of forced labour upon arrival.
- Cotton is in 40% of all textiles, and is known to have people enslaved at every stage of the industry, from germination, harvesting, spinning, to manufacturing the clothes.
- It would cost consumers as little as 1.8% more per item to double the pay of a sweat shop worker. A study showed that consumers would be willing to pay up to 15% more for slavery-free clothing.
- As many as one in three foreign workers in Malaysia’s electronics sector may be working under conditions of forced labour.
- Coltan and other “conflict minerals” present in electronics devices often come from forced labour in illegal mining whose profits support armed forces.
- Forced labour is big business, with profits estimated at $150 billion, or around £125 billion.
- Some countries have been making efforts to force companies to take steps to ensure their supply chains are slavery-free, including Brazil’ has a “Dirty List,” the UK’s Modern Slavery Act and the U.S. Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act.
Take Action: Palm oil
Yes I believe the clothing industry is doing this. Some of the products they make have such high quality stitchery that I cannot believe my eyes! When I was working in Canada in the clothing industry we got this skid, and it had this big deformity on it that was about 2 feet long and about 1 foot in width and about 4-6 inches high and it was on the bottom of the skid. It reminded me of Ebola! Oi! CAT
Hi peeps I agree and thanks for this helpful info.