Hiding in Plain Sight

"There is quite a lot of modern slavery in the UK,” states Dr Johanne Grosvold. “It’s a problem that’s seen as happening elsewhere and so it might be in your product supply chain – but actually what we know from research is that it’s also very prevalent in the UK hospitality industry, in construction and other, similar industries.”  

Modern slavery – defined by the UK Government as ‘situations of exploitation that a person cannot leave due to coercion, use of force, abuse of vulnerability, deception or other means’ – is horrifyingly widespread. According to the International Labour Organization, over 27 million people worldwide were subjected to forced labour in 2021. With businesses relying on increasingly complex and globalised supply chains, what can they do to avoid it?  

Johanne recently partnered with the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, the London Universities Purchasing Consortium and charity Unseen UK to examine the intersections between climate change and modern slavery in public procurement. While the two might seem at first glance to be disparate issues, the effects of climate change are causing those migrating away from affected countries to be especially vulnerable to human rights abuse. 

Best efforts 

The key, she thinks, lies not in criticising organisations that are found to be falling short – “I genuinely think the majority of people we spoke to, hand on heart, thought they were doing everything they could” – but rather praising those taking actions to improve. 

“I think a sensible way forward is to say that this is not a problem that’s going to go away, but if you can show that you have systematically implemented best practice to minimise the risk, then you shouldn’t be punished,” Johanne explains. 

She continues: “One of the people we spoke to with lived experience of modern slavery said that they don’t want firms found to have relied on purchasing from organisations with employees living in these conditions to be punished. If they try to remedy the situation, then that’s great – they should be held up as examples of what you can do. By making organisations feel like they can’t identify the problem for fear of it besmirching their reputation, you’re making the problem harder to address.” 

What’s more, the UK’s Modern Slavery Act was only adopted into law as recently as 2015. “There was already legislation on the books of different kinds – but it wasn’t called modern slavery,” asserts Professor Andrew Crane, Director of the Centre for Business, Organisations & Society. He points out, however, that forced labour was already illegal. 

“From a business point of view, one of the main challenges is: how do you deal with modern slavery in the supply chain? We know it’s illegal, but how do you then make firms accountable? And the legislation didn’t go very far on that,” he says. “In fact, the Government weren’t originally going to have anything to do with business in the Act, but they changed at the eleventh hour and introduced a new section on transparency and supply chains.” 

Andrew has seen research in the field rapidly gather momentum since he published his first paper on the subject in 2013: “I think it would be reasonable to say that I when I published [that] paper, it was mainly just me doing research on [the overlap between] business and modern slavery in business schools.” In contrast, last year he brought together the largest ever gathering of business and modern slavery researchers and practitioners for the second annual conference on the topic. 

Helping or harming? 

Pankhuri is part of a team who carried out a study into garment workers in Leicester. What they found is that the people affected – primarily South Asian women – had since been left without “not just work, but also a sense of identity, a sense of social belonging”. They were left, as Pankhuri points out, with fewer choices than before. 

While some men in the communities concerned had been able to find subsequent employment as taxi drivers, doing delivery work or in factories for other industries, the women were unable to do so. The geography of the city itself exacerbated this, as garment factories had been the only ones close enough to residential areas for women without transport to fit around childcare and school runs. What’s more, Boohoo has now simply moved its production overseas. 

“There is so much evidence from across the globe that when you use the term ‘modern slavery’, you are encouraging approaches that are not targeting systemic issues,” she explains. Instead, governments should seek to address the wider factors that leave people vulnerable to labour exploitation in the first place. 

Pankhuri continues: “Why are people lining up outside food banks? Why are they unemployed? Why can’t they find jobs? If women can’t travel for work, then what was the use of closing factories?” 

A better intervention, she suggests, would be to pay attention to the initiatives that are already working, such as community centres run by local women’s groups to upskill people, and to invest in these. Criminal investigations are a blunt instrument that can harm the people they intend to help. 

Another potential positive step would be a requirement for companies retailing in the UK to produce a certain percentage of their wares in UK factories – thus avoiding situations such as that in Leicester, where facilities are simply closed wholesale in response to labour exploitation allegations – with greater oversight to ensure that workers are paid the minimum wage and treated fairly. 

“The ideal response would be to question, ‘Why are the media and the state using this modern slavery rhetoric? What purpose does it serve?’” says Pankhuri, preferring terms such as ‘forced labour’ and ‘labour exploitation’. “Modern slavery itself becomes a very fairytale issue [with one imagined villain]. In many ways, the label of modern slavery actually does a disservice.”