I recently attended the launch of a report on equipping the UK to fight modern day slavery. It was written by Andrew Wallis, CEO of Unseen, a charity established to disrupt and challenge modern slavery. The report calls for significant change in the way the issue is dealt with by government, the police, NGOs, the public and the business community.
A number of speakers made the link between ‘Horsegate’ and human slavery. Both are a product of the murkiness and complexity of our supply chains. If, unbeknown to the retailer and the principal supplier, horsemeat can get into a lasagne, so too can human slavery, they argued.
Yet slavery is something we abolished 200 years ago, didn’t we? Britain led the way and our own William Wilberforce put a stop to it. That’s why we celebrated this momentous achievement in 2007.
It transpires that we shouldn’t be celebrating at all. It is impossible to quantify the scale of modern slavery but it is thought there are more people globally in enforced servitude today than at any time in history.
“The phrase ‘gang labour’ sanitises the criminality of ‘slavery’”
One of the myths the March 2013 Centre for Social Justice report identifies about modern slavery is that it only exists within the sex industry. “There were 250 known cases of labour exploitation in the UK alone in 2012,” it notes. “But as with other forms of forced labour, it is under-reported due in large to the fact that vulnerable victims are unlikely to speak out.”
We would be blind to think this isn’t an issue for the UK food industry. Last year, a UK egg supplier used a licensed labour provider to supply workers to catch chickens on sites all over the UK. “This labour provider subjected migrant workers to debt bondage, giving them no option to leave the squalid house in which they were forced to live and sleep,” according to the CSJ.
“The firm’s exploitation of the workers was ‘so extreme’ that two individuals were arrested for human trafficking offences and reportedly perpetrated ‘one of the worst cases of exploitation the Gangmasters Licensing Authority has ever uncovered in the food supply chain’”. It is a shocking reminder of how easily the food in our supply chain becomes tainted by slavery.
One of measures the report calls for is the use of the word ‘slavery’ to be used in reporting a story like this. The phrase ‘gang labour’ simply doesn’t have the same impact and sanitises the criminality. The report suggests the word ‘slavery’ is easily definable and calls on the media and society to call it what it is.
Barack Obama said much the same in a speech six months ago: “It ought to concern every business, because it distorts markets,” he said. “It ought to concern every nation, because it endangers public health and fuels violence and organized crime. I’m talking about the injustice, the outrage, of human trafficking, which must be called by its true name - modern slavery.”
The horsemeat scandal has thrown light on the vulnerability of our food chain to abuse. We must use this report as a catalyst to also cast light on an even more serious issue - modern day slavery.
James Foottit is managing director of Higgidy
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