As the financial crisis deepens, it raises serious questions regarding the people at the bottom of supply chains who have to cater to the growing global demand for cheaper products. How does the crisis affect them? And who exactly does it affect? Will children be hit the hardest?

A new report by the ILO states that the crisis could push an increasing number of children, particularly girls into child labour. Over the past 3 years, Impactt has found 615 children working in factories around the world, ranging in age from 9 to just short of 16.

Last year we found 21 children at a garment factory in China, most of whom were girls. They had enrolled in a ‘private school’ to learn sewing skills. The school acts as an agent for the factory and routinely takes children there for work.

Their working conditions were appalling. On average, they worked 80-90 hours per week including night time work. They did not have medical checks, health & safety training or even the necessary PPE (personal protective equipment). Their supervisors shouted at them if they made mistakes or worked too slowly. They did not earn minimum wages in standard time and did not get any overtime premiums.

Impactt liaised with the brand, supplier and factory to try and remediate these children in line with the Child Labour Operational Procedures. The aim was to get them out of work and into fully sponsored education while also paying their wages until they reached legal working age. However, in most cases, their parents refused to cooperate because they had doubts about the programme or had been threatened by the factory. In fact, one of the teachers from the sewing school had visited the childrens’ families and warned them against the remediation programme.

In the end, we were able to remediate 1 child. She is now studying computer advertising design at a technical school. Her teachers report she is a diligent student and is making good progress. She lives in the school dormitory and has many friends. At the end of her course, she would like to take up a job in the field of advertising design.

The unfortunate reality is that many brands and retailers probably have child workers at some level in their supply chain. Clean audit reports may inspire confidence that the problem is diminishing, but maybe this just means we need to dig deeper.

And the problem could get worse. As families struggle to make ends meet, there is a great incentive to send children to work. As factories struggle to find cheaper labour, there is a greater incentive to hire children.

What role will brands play in addressing this problem?

Blood, Sweat and Takeaways often felt like a programme with two stories: one which focussed on how the British visitors were able to relate to the native workers: make friends, empathise and build respect; and another which focussed on their reaction against the unfamiliar living and working conditions: disgust, shock, physical revulsion.  Seeing the latter was not pleasant, where peoples’ daily lived reality is reduced to a device for shock factor TV.  However it is perhaps these raw reactions that bring home the vast inequalities to be found in the history of a tin of tuna.

Watching the Brits build work and live with the workers allowed the programme to explore some of the impacts that the food supply chain has on people’s lives.  From the positives: a regular source of income, funding for children’s education, to the negatives: the splitting of families, poor living conditions and low wages.  Stacey’s view that ‘no-one should have to make such huge sacrifices for Western benefit’ collides head-on with James’ recognition that ‘if we didn’t have the 140,000 chickens coming through a day we wouldn’t be employing those 5000 people… wouldn’t have jobs, wouldn’t be able support a family…’ 

Clearly there are no easy answers; however at Impactt we believe that where the actions of retailers/brands directly impact on the lives and communities of workers/growers in developing countries there is both a great deal of responsibility but also potential for effecting positive change.  To this end Impactt is working towards enabling buyers to make ‘pro-development’ decisions.

Throughout the series the Brits’ realised that by virtue of the opportunities they had access to during their lives they have a myriad of choices unavailable to the workers they encountered.  In the Western context we are perhaps spoilt for choice but with an awareness of the broad-reaching power of our purchasing decisions we can also be empowered by it.   We watch as Josh takes on new shopping choices with gusto; he dips into a strangers shopping basket pulling out a banana like a game show host and asks: ‘are these Fairtrade bananas?’  The final episode attracted 546,000 viewers, 1/3 of which were between 16 and 34 years old, the fact that these issues captured the interest of a young demographic is exciting and begs the question, what next?  May this be a first step for responsible purchasing decisions; from consumers all the way up to the brands.

Network Clothing is one of the leading manufacturers of handmade crochet and knitwear garments. Since 1994, the company has supplied leading UK and international retailers. Network Clothing has a network of around 3,000 home workers within its supply chain, around 1,000 of whom are active at any given time. Most of the home workers are based in and around Shantou, Guangdong.

Brands and retailers are increasingly demanding greater visibility over homeworking within global supply chains.    Network Clothing identified the need to gain a better understanding of the role that homeworkers play within its supply chain to mitigate any associated risk to the business.   

Network Clothing commissioned Impactt to:

• Map its supply chain in Shantou and track how product is moved from factory to home worker.
• Understand who is working in their supply chains and under what conditions.
• Gauge the impact of homeworking on the workers’ lives, families and communities.
• Identify existing problems and areas that could be improved.
• Understand and develop any necessary control measures to protect home workers.

Impactt mapped Network Clothing’s supply chain and identified two communities of homeworkers who were significantly affected by Network Clothing’s operations.  In-depth community assessments were conducted to understand homeworkers’ situation and socio-economic circumstances. Particular focus was applied to:

• Establishing their level of take-home pay and what this can procure.
• Identifying the benefits which this work brings them and their families.
• Understanding what other options are open to these workers and why they choose this work.
• Understanding the concerns they have about the work.

The community assessments utilised a participatory worker-centred approach to provide a real insight into the situation of the homeworkers. The outputs from this research helped Network Clothing begin to make meaningful improvements in the working conditions and the socio-economic situation of homeworkers.

Whilst issues exist in this supply chain, it was clear that homework provides significant benefit to workers, in particular where workers have few other options to earn money.  In many cases, crocheting skills have been passed from generation to generation and provide valuable income to families and communities which may otherwise be solely reliant on agriculture or remittances.   Workers spoke positively about their work and the benefits it brings.

Entitled ‘The Island of Happiness: Exploitation of migrant workers on Saadiyat Island’,  the report comes just seven weeks after Panorama’ ‘Slumdogs and Millionaires’, an hour long expose of working conditions on Dubai’s construction sites generating huge international media coverage.

Currently a mangrove swamp, the increasingly ironically named ‘The Island of Happiness’ is a high profile, multipurpose development which, once completed, will be home to, amongst other things, the Guggenheim and Louvre museums, a campus of New York University, 2 golf courses, private residences, a marina, and 29 hotels.

2,000 workers are said to be on site so far, preparing the island for development, with the numbers increasing significantly through the rest of 2009. At its peak the island will have 40,000 workers.

The key criticisms levied in the report are:

• Workers were required to pay fees to agencies to get their jobs, despite this being outlawed in the UAE
• Passports retained and no opportunity to transfer jobs as a result of visa restrictions
• Low take home pay (said to be significantly lower than workers were promised by agents before they left their home countries)
• No facilities for organising collectively and limited access to legal facilities for remediating issues

The report also sets out recommendations for the Tourism Development Investment Company (TDIC - the developer responsible for Saadiyat Island which is owned by the Abu Dhabi government), the other organisations involved including the Guggenheim Foundation and NYU University, the contractors in the project and the government of the UAE.

The government has cricised the report, saying that it “lacked credibility, substance and transparency and failed to recognise the government’s consistent efforts to improve the rights and conditions of all those working in the country”. “The UAE is particularly surprised and disappointed by HRW’s attempts to sensationalise the drawbacks in the country’s labour policies into media sound bites, without consideration of the rapid strides that have been made over the past few years and that are well underway here as part of the UAE government agenda,” he told WAM. TDIC issued a statement yesterday saying that  “the report not only neglects ’s policies, procedures and actions related to worker welfare, but also makes misleading assertions and false assumptions due to HRW’s questionable methodology and flawed research”.

This is a familiar stand-off between the campaigners and the employers.  In our experience, on the one hand, allegations are rarely completely unfounded, but on the other, campaigners fail to take into account the complexity of delivering good labour standards in complex supply chains.  We generally find that the truth lies somewhere in between.  Key areas of difficulty tend to include:

• Policies and procedures in place at the top level but the nature of the supply chain and subcontracting means that workers do not experience the benefits in their day to day working lives
• Companies’ internal compliance teams are sometimes not sufficiently resourced and/or trained and are are unable  to get to the bottom of the issues
• Worker interviews are sometimes not placed at the heart of internal auditing methodologies, and thus the findings of any investigation are limited
• Workers are scared of speaking to internal auditors, as they perceive them to be representatives of management, and they fear that they will lose their jobs if they are honest about their working conditions.  They often speak more freely to journalists or researchers.

TDIC and the other companies involved have the opportunity to look very hard at their own processes and to make sure they have a good understanding of the experiences of workers, now when the workforce is at only 5% of its eventual strength.  As the workforce swells, the issues will become more complex and the opportunities for problems will multiply.  We urge TDIC to work with its critics to demonstrate a real commitment to making the Island of Happiness a reality for all involved.

On day one, we see a video of the experiences of one migrant worker forced to return from Shenzhen to her parents’ farm in her village, following a huge drop in the monthly wages she can now earn.  She reports that where she could formerly earn up to 2,500 yuan per month, she is now only able to earn 800 yuan per month, barely enough for her to buy food.  She is facing a similar story to the estimated 140 million migrant workers across China, and is now forced to turn her back on the bright lights of the city to return to a place where she says “there’s still nothing much to do…just watch TV or help with chores.”

The series promises to provide an interesting insight into the challenges facing China and her citizens in the current economic climate.  We will watch it with interest.

Starting on Tuesday 19^th May 2009, Blood Sweat and Takeaways will examine the working conditions in the food industry in South East Asia. Six British fast food fanatics will live and work alongside workers catching, harvesting and processing food products such as tuna and prawns in Indonesia and rice and chicken in Thailand. The TV programme will examine the human cost of the food industry.

The first programme looks at Indonesia’s tuna industry in Bitung on the island of Sulawesi. In the UK, we consume over a billion tins of tuna each year and Bitung’s canneries supply many British supermarkets and food service companies.  The participants live with tuna workers in basic communities, endure 90-degree heat in the canneries and struggle with the harsh realities of life on a traditional wooden tuna boat in the western Pacific.

Watch a clip of the fast food fanatics visiting a Tuna factory here

[youtube:]

We are excited to see that the BBC is exploring working conditions in the food industry as a follow-up to last year’s series. The title suggests that the focus of the programmes will not be solely on supermarkets, but that it will also target the food service industry.  This is an unusual approach as the British supermarkets are usually the target of these types of expose. The issues of course are widespread in the food industry and are not only located in the supply chains of supermarkets. On reflection, last year’s series covered the issues sensitively and intelligently and we hope this year’s season does the same.

We maintain a large database of relevant news stories, blogs and resources on a wide range of topics:

• Ethical trade
• Labour standards
• Working conditions
• Gangmasters
• Migrant labour

The database currently holds over 3000 stories and is updated daily and covers stories from across the globe.  We tag and categorise these stories using our Delicious account. These stories provide the basis for the Impactt newsfeed, which is delivered via RSS or email to our readers every day.

To access our database and explore the resources by date or by subject tag, please click here.

• Shared safety alerts - members submit information about health and safety incidents in their businesses and these are shared on a weekly basis with all members. These alerts detail what the issue was and what measures should be put in place to prevent it. The safety alerts have been on topics such as ‘Safeguards against fires and explosions during construction’, ‘Amputation due to miscommunication’ and ‘Kitchen burn injury’.
• Best practice alerts - again these are shared by members of the initiative, but focus on sharing good practice that prevents H&S issues. Topics have included: ‘Communicating alerts effectively’, ‘The Don’t Walk by Campaign’ and the ‘30 minute bin it - housekeeping campaign’.
• Database of statistics - driven by a lack of reliable data from other sources, 16 of the main contractors of BSU now submit their accident information to the database on a weekly basis. There is a full set of data for the year 2008 which shows interesting trends in accidents and lost time injuries.
• Focus Groups - working groups which develop best practice guidance for members on key H&S issues such as falls from height and labour camp accommodation.

Information about all of the above can be found on the BSU website, along with useful reference information and tools such as H&S legislation, safety posters and risk assessments for key machinery/processes in construction. In the spirit of sharing and free access, anyone can sign up to the website to review this information.

With a general absence in the UAE of capacity building partnerships to tackle labour standards issues, Impactt applauds the work of BSU. While there is surely more work to be done inside member companies in terms of addressing health and safety issues, at least they have publicly committed to taking steps to do so and are working together to achieve a common goal.  

The challenge to the initiative is to spread its reach further and recruit those companies who have not yet understood the business benefits of good health and safety. Graeme Mc Caig, Chairman of BSU (and General Manager of Dutco Balfour Beatty) is a firm believer and champion of this case: “By implementing an effective H&S management system in your business, you will make more money… When you invest in H&S you will get a return”.

Currently BSU does not engage directly with workers and relies upon a top down approach for communicating the shared safety and best practice alerts. To ensure the full extent of its good work is being realised, BSU should consider involving workers in the initiative and harnessing their knowledge. Our experience from other industries shows that workers have some of the best and most cost effective ideas for tackling health and safety issues!