SET THEM FREE
Julia Ormond, actress and former UN Goodwill Ambassador against Trafficking and Slavery, founded the non-profit ASSET – Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking – in 2007. Here she ponders what has progressed over the past decade.
Julia Ormond founded the non-profit Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking in 2007. What has progressed over the past decade?
Just before Christmas, I experienced the privilege of standing at the very top of Sydney Harbour Bridge, viewing a city and world of breathtaking beauty. I marvel at the places my life’s path has taken me, and there are times when the world’s beauty so overwhelms, that the shadow of all our worst behaviour seems so distant, as to be imagined.
Over the past two decades I’ve travelled all over the world to learn about human rights. From 2005 to 2008 I was a UN Goodwill Ambassador against Trafficking and Slavery, and in 2007 founded a non-profit called ASSET – Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking. During this period, I learnt a great deal about the UN and its internal challenges around this issue. There are phenomenal and inspiring individuals within the UN who have dedicated their lives to positive human progress. They bear the burden of the wider UN with its highly laudable Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the restrictions it faces by having to juggle the demands of member states and their respective donors. An informed public could surpass that by tapping into their own consumer spending power.
Trafficking, enslavement and forced labour, however, are the common denominators that undermine each of the UN SDG agendas, yet are rarely set as the priority. The reality is we will never achieve our goals around global health and HIV/AIDS if we don’t address sex trafficking; we will never have a healthy environment if we do not address forced labour in deforestation; and we will never tackle food insecurity if we run out of seafood, as predicted, in 2048, if we do not address forced labour in illegal fishing. Each of these intersects connect to supply chains. As a consumer, asking about how and where a product is made and where the raw materials originate sends a message up the chain that today isn’t going unheard in the C-suite.
People often ask me where is it worst. And I always answer: in my own home. There’s a certain comfort in hearing it’s in a faraway country: it fosters denial, allows us to ignore the reality that you and I are paying for this crime of forced labour, to the tune of US$150 billion in the private economy. We need also to see this not as an issue solely applicable to girls and women in sex trafficking, when the largest groups are mining and agriculture and both of these feed into manufacturing. Women and men in these circumstances are woefully vulnerable to, amongst other abuses, being sexually harassed and abused. Statistics that are generated globally also reflect the fact that there are large numbers of shelters globally for girls and women, not so for men and boys, and we need to change that.
I have done many life-changing trips to most continents to meet survivors of all faces of this issue – forced sex trade and forced labour in agriculture, mining, fishing, manufacturing, domestic servitude and child soldiers, among other areas. I met with non-profits and shelters, and UN and local government officials in various departments responsible for generating our global response. I came to see slavery in virtually every country and virtually every supply chain, and simultaneously see that we were for the most part as consumers oblivious to it.
I was stunned to learn early on that if we were to remove from our wardrobes every item that didn’t have a single taint of slavery in it, we’d be dressed in threads. It was a chilling realisation that despite all our global wars, laws and pledges, we had only made slavery go underground and not away, and that I could be paying for and facilitating their abuse. The good news is the past decade has seen increased intensity as technology starts to fill gaps that previous manual monitoring couldn’t achieve with complex supply chains.
Much of the micro-challenges are dominated by needs for mapping, tracking and tracing of places, people, product and practices, before we can assess remedies and their shared costs. If we apply blockchain technology, satellites and GPS tracking, biometric technology of fingerprints and facial recognition, and internal and external complaints mechanisms using mobile technology, we can map the global workforce and automate its evaluation around work conditions. Soon we will be able to do these things in real time. One external complaints mechanisms company is LaborVoices, a company that enables thousands of workers to empower the job hunter to find factory owners who their peer group has rated.
In 2007, most brands we approached to discuss supply chains simply shut the door in our faces. But denial was not just the problem, it was unfortunately legally locked and enabled by corporate structures. The only way forward to address the issue was to change the law, to be able to discuss it openly and deal with it.
ASSET concluded that we had to take a legislative approach and ASSET became the source of the Transparency in Supply Chains (TISC) Law in California (2012). TISC requires the major manufacturers and retailers to tell us what they are doing to eradicate trafficking, forced labour and slavery in their product supply chains.
We went on to collaborate with the charity Unseen in the UK, on the inclusion of the Transparency in Supply Chains UK provision within the UK Modern Slavery Act (MSA) of 2015. Now the Australian government is looking at its own version.
Australia has more than just the fashion industry that it can positively impact. In the mining sector, Australian mining of coltan and tantalum has a strong connection to forced labour. Illegal fishing and shark fishing not far off the coast of Australia could play a huge role in taking seafood off the menu by 2048. Australia has an opportunity to align, upgrade and scale disclosure requirements around transparency. And every country in the world has local spots of forced labour and sex trafficking, right under our noses.
In fashion, feelgood and real-good are starting to march down the catwalk hand in hand. Brands like Burberry are doing well on transparency compliance reports.
ASSET’s work today is to support the conscious consumerism trend, take the outcomes of legally enabled transparency disclosures, support their credible evaluation and rating, and get that information into the hands of the consumer, so that those who care can easily answer that question ‘What do I buy?’, and with every dollar that they spend, vote for the world that they want.
“Despite all our global wars, laws and pledges we had only made slavery go underground, not away”