Happy New Year and Happy Lunar New Year, all! For NGO leaders, the beginning of a new year often means working with your teams to compile and analyze the organization’s metrics for the previous year - to figure out what’s working well and what’s not, and do more of the former and less of the latter in the coming year. For Issara Institute, many of our key metrics are publicly tracked and reported on the Inclusive Labor Monitoring (ILM) Community Dashboards at www.workervoices.org/community-dashboard.
Recently, one of our most reported and discussed metrics has been our main remediation metric - 153,194 workers receiving remediation over the past 3 years for labor abuses reported to Issara Institute and civil society partners in the Inclusive Labor Monitoring Action Network.
153,194. That’s a lot of workers suffering labor abuses. That’s also a lot of remediation effort. Most of these cases occurred in Thailand or Malaysia, to workers of Bangladeshi, Burmese, Cambodian, Nepali, and other Asian nationalities working in industries such as apparel and footwear, electronics, food and beverage, and seafood. A smaller number were sexual harassment, exploitative recruitment, and human trafficking cases from Asia (primarily Nepal) to countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and UAE in the Middle East, and Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, and the United Kingdom in Europe. Some cases impacted thousands of workers, though the majority of remediation cases were individuals or impacted tens or hundreds of workers.
The great majority of worker-reported labor abuses in Thailand and Malaysia were remedied in partnership with the workers’ employers. These employers - factories, farms, plants, plantations - are also often suppliers within the supply chains of one or more of Issara’s Strategic Partners. Issara Strategic Partners are businesses that provide an annual charitable contribution to support the work of the Institute. Many of these supplier sites are Tier 1 and Tier 2 sites exporting goods from Thailand and Malaysia, subjected to audits on a regular basis. Social audits, however, are finding few if any of the labor issues that workers are reporting to us and the ILM Action Network.
In one factory recently, for example, workers had reported to Issara 16 different issues impacting hundreds of workers within a span of a few months. Yet the factory had just passed a recent round of social audits, which apparently detected none - zero percent - of the issues raised by workers to Issara’s independent worker voice channels. This is a very typical situation in our day to day work.
Top 5 questions about remediation in supply chains. At this point we are often asked a number of questions. The Q&A often goes like this:
What kind of labor abuses are reported to a local NGO but not auditors…and why? The top labor abuses reported by workers of different nationalities in different countries and industries can be explored at www.workervoices.org in the ILM Community Dashboard, Ethical Supply Chains tab. You can see that it is a mix of different issues, from late or missing payments to physical abuse by line supervisors to issues with workloads. Why are workers reporting cases to local NGOs vs. auditors? The answer is clear: because workers trust us. We educate and safeguard them. We hear them and help them get their issues remediated. Why would a worker trust a social auditor - a stranger they have never met, who most often does not speak their language, interferes with their time on the line and ability to meet targets, has no direct line to or commitment to remediation, and is most often contracted by the employer? If you were a worker in a factory far from home, would you share your grievances with someone you’ve never met and will probably never see again - and who is likely contracted by your employer? If your supervisor was your abuser and they saw you talking to an auditor, what concerns would you have and what could that auditor do to protect you from reprisal in the weeks and months ahead?
Why wouldn’t the workers just go to human resources? This is an important question we ask regularly because, ideally, this is the goal - people with issues at work should be able to go to their employer’s human resources department or use the internal grievance mechanism and feel confident and safe that their grievance will be handled swiftly and professionally. And indeed, when workers call us, we do ask them if they have contacted human resources for help - if not, why not, or if so, how did it go and how can we help further? What we learn from workers is that, essentially, many internal grievance mechanisms are far from fair and functional. Some have no interpretation services for workers. Others have issues with unchecked retaliation. Yet others are simply unresponsive, or quietly discouraging of lodging grievances. A number of Burmese and Cambodian worker leaders came together last year and made a really lovely, eye-opening 10-minute video entitled Why are Safeguards So Important in Grievance Mechanisms? - please check it out!
How serious were these issues, are they really legit labor abuse cases? Yes these are legitimate labor issues being raised. Some issues are urgent threats to worker well-being while some are not, some are violations of law and some are not. Some are constellations of violations that would amount to forced labor or human trafficking, and some are not. But they are all legitimate labor issues and it is actually extremely productive when worker voice channels and grievance mechanisms receive not only serious cases but also less serious ones before they escalate.
Are workers really capable of using apps and such to report issues? I didn’t think unskilled workers were so educated or tech literate. Absolutely, many are. Our receiving 10,000-20,000 calls and messages per month from male and female workers across a range of nationalities, ethnicities, and ages attests to this.
How are these cases getting remediated, and how are you so sure? We raise these issues with the suppliers/employers, they respond, and workers check in regularly to provide updates on the progress of remediation. Most often, issues are remediated without too much drama. However, if there is any reticence we may escalate to their customers that are our Strategic Partners, and/or consult with the government for guidance and support. We also know when worker-reported issues are remediated because the affected workers validate their experience and satisfaction with the remediation. It’s worth pointing out that when the quality of remediation is validated by workers, rather than just the suppliers themselves, it can yield dramatically different data than what is typically self-reported by suppliers to prove and close out a corrective action plan (CAP) triggered by an audit. This should not be surprising, though.
The ethical dilemma of remediation. As you read this, take a moment to reflect on how you feel about it. What’s happening in your gut? Do you feel good about so many issues being detected and remediated due to the bravery and empowerment of workers, and the collaboration of engaged suppliers? Or do you feel bad about there still being so much exploitation in global supply chains?
Both? Yes…us too. If you run hotlines and/or seek to uncover worker grievances, you have a duty of care to act upon that information and not put workers at risk in the process. Remediation can be an extremely labor intensive process, especially if suppliers are reticent and their customers do not reinforce their ethical sourcing policies and expectations. We answer hotline calls and worker voice messages at nights, weekends, and around the clock - talking to workers when it’s convenient for them, typically during off-shift hours.
A couple days ago I walked through our Bangkok regional office and asked some colleagues, “Hey! In the past 3 years we have helped 153,194 workers get their labor abuses remediated - how does that make you feel?” Here is a summary of how several colleagues responded:
We all need to talk a lot more seriously about prevention.
Prevention is where we want to be. Of course, prevention of modern slavery in supply chains is what you would expect a human rights NGO person to advocate for, because we have a duty of care and want to prevent any person from unnecessarily suffering harm. But are we getting closer to prevention being what you would expect companies and governments to rally around and invest in as well? With finite resources to spend on human rights due diligence and slavery in supply chains, what are these resources best spent on?
Imagine, if you will…
Independent worker voice channels run by networks of locally based NGOs, collaborating with local suppliers and recruitment agencies to detect and remediate issues and their root causes. These networks are detecting issues such as illicit brokers in origin countries, intervening before workers leave the country indebted and extorted - thus rooting out illegal broker fees from international recruitment processes, which is otherwise extremely difficult for suppliers in destination countries to do. This, in turn, means that brands and retailers don’t need to audit so aggressively for unallowed recruitment fees, and that suppliers don’t need to pay so much in unallowed recruitment fees as remediation - which saves millions of U.S. dollars for suppliers such as those running large Tier 1 factories, as we have in Southeast Asia.
I have good news! This already exists. It’s called Inclusive Labor Monitoring. Independent worker voice channels run by locally based NGOs (like us) that workers trust get the real picture of what’s happening in recruitment corridors and worksites. And through partnership with suppliers, we translate this to targeting and addressing root causes - from entrenched local brokers to understaffed, undertrained interpreter teams, and everything in between. We are preventing harm, hearing from workers on an ongoing basis to ensure their well-being, supporting suppliers in strengthening their grievance mechanisms, and reducing the need for costly audits trying to find risks and harms that have already negatively impacted workers.
This is all absolutely achievable, right now. We have the models and the technologies to scale up. My proposal: if social audits are a $40 billion/year industry and growing, money that business is already spending to meet business and human rights standards and requirements - can we crowd in more companies in 2025 to work with us to go beyond audits to support worker voice mechanisms that are trusted by workers and yield measurable, positive impacts for businesses as well as workers and communities?
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