Labor is Not a Commodity

A Sweet Day

By Elizabeth O'Connell, Fair Trade Campaigns Director, Green America

Yesterday was a day that I have been looking forward to for a long time.  It was the day we finally got to deliver all 100,000 petitions that the Raise the Bar, Hershey! campaign has collected to their intended recipient: John Bilbrey, CEO of Hershey.

We have been collecting petitions for just over a year.  Signers are calling on the Hershey Company to remove forced labor, child labor, and human trafficking from its chocolate bars.  In partnership with Global Exchange, the International Labor Rights Forum, the Not for Sale Campaign, the New York State Labor Religion Coalition, and countless schools and congregations, we gathered more than 50,000 signatures.  Then last month we teamed up with Change.org, an online platform for social change, to collect another 50,000 signers to our online petition.  (This platform also sends automatic emails to Hershey executives, board members, and members of the Corporate Social Responsibility team.  If you haven’t signed yet, it’s not too late!)

So, with heavy boxes of signatures in hand, and dressed in our most appropriate Halloween costumes, (I went as a member of a Child Labor Hazard Squad) we headed north up to Hershey, PA.

Before we even reached the front door of Hershey’s Corporate Headquarters, we were approached by two men who must have been part of Hershey’s security team. They were ready for us and seemed pretty nervous about what we had brought for them. (This campaign is having an impact!)

Scan a Barcode, Learn About a Product

By Julie Kaszton, Outreach Coordinator, Free2Work

This Friday, October 21^st, Free2Work is launching its new app with barcode scanning technology at Not For Sale’s Global Forum on Human Trafficking.   Free2Work is ground central for the modern-day abolitionist movement and provides consumers and activists easy access to information on a company’s efforts to eliminate forced and child labor in its supply chain.  

The mobile application, available on iPhone and Android, equips consumers with valuable information on companies’ labor standards and production practices at the moment they need it most – while they shop.  Built-in barcode scanning technology enables consumers to scan the barcode of a specific product and instantly gain access to information about that company’s efforts to address forced and child labor in its supply chain.  The aim of the app is to encourage companies to be more transparent about production practices and to enable consumers to make smart purchasing decisions that have a positive impact on workers’ lives.   

Additionally, a new share component within the app gives consumers the ability to share all this information with their social networks on Facebook and Twitter. Social media posts are linked via hashtags to the specific company’s profile page, empowering consumers to directly voice their concerns about companies’ production practices.  Consumers can also use the app to participate in the evaluation process by inputting basic product information such as product name, UPC code, raw materials, and country of manufacture. 

The app has been featured on Al Jazeera, Forbes India, and CNN and was awarded "One of the Great 11 Apps of 2011" at the San Francisco AppShow.  

Rohin Dharmakumar, business reporter for Forbes India, explained: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Today, we ask, ‘If companies do ugly things, but consumers don’t hear of them, are the companies still guilty?’ Free2Work is collating and channeling supply chain and labor practices information from around the world and putting it right into your hands.” 

The U.S. – Colombia FTA: a bad deal for workers and labor rights

By Eric Gottwald, International Labor Rights Forum

After five years of struggle, the U.S. Congress passed the U.S. trade promotion agreement with Colombia on October 12^th.  The International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) has opposed the passage of any FTA with Colombia until the Colombian government demonstrates the political will and capacity to make meaningful, lasting improvements to its dismal record on enforcing internationally-recognized, fundamental labor rights.  

For over a decade, Colombia has been the world’s most dangerous country to be a trade unionist. According to the Solidarity Center of the AFL-CIO, roughly 4,000 Colombian trade unionists have been murdered in the past 20 years.  Fifty one Colombian unionists were murdered in 2010, more than the rest of the world combined.  Shockingly, virtually no one is prosecuted or convicted for these crimes, with an impunity rate of approximately 96 percent.

In 2009, the ILRF submitted written comments to the United States Trade Representative outlining a set of labor rights benchmarks that the Colombian government should meet before the U.S. considers the passage of any FTA, including:

•  Demonstrate a dramatic and sustained reduction (and eventual elimination) of violence and threats against trade unionists and other human rights defenders.
•  Demonstrate a dramatic increase in the rates of investigation and successful prosecution of those who commit acts of violence against trade unionists, including exploring alleged links between paramilitary groups, multinational corporations, and Colombian security forces.    
• Enact labor law reforms to bring Colombia in compliance with the 8 ILO Core Conventions it has ratified and close the loopholes in Colombian law that allow employers to use “labor cooperatives,” temporary contracting, and other schemes that undermine Colombian workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively.  

The Hershey Company is a Master of Philanthropy, but Not Accountability

By Judy Gearhart, Executive Director, International Labor Rights Forum 

The Hershey Company is working hard to promote its charitable giving programs to poor African farmers and, indeed, it is high time they attempt to address the effects of crushing poverty in the region.  Hershey is unwilling, however, to be accountable to these farmers in a more significant and straightforward way.  Hershey needs to stop ‘blowing their own horn’ and instead pay a decent price for their cocoa and accept their share of responsibility for the rampant use of child labor and forced child labor on the farms where they buy cocoa.

In their press release about fighting malaria in Ghana, Hershey makes much to do about being a founding member of the U.S. Department of Labor’s $17 million Framework of Action to combat the worst forms of child labor in Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, yet they do not say how much – or how little – they are contributing to that fund.  So while Hershey promotes its charitable giving and its nominal support for much-needed assistance programs (paid for mainly by U.S. taxpayers), it continues to refuse to make real commitments to third party monitoring of child labor in its supply chain. 

The U.S. Department of Labor enlisted Tulane University experts to conduct a multi-year, independent evaluation of company efforts to work with local governments to stop the use of child labor in cocoa farming.  The results showed how little has been achieved in the past ten years and that there is a need for more direct, third party monitoring.  The study recommended that companies should commit to traceability systems in their cocoa supply chains, which “enables the enforcement of standards at the producer level and is a requirement of product certification.”

Department of Labor Releases New Reports on Child Labor

By Elizabeth O’Connell, Fair Trade Campaigns Director, Green America

On October 3rd the Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB), a division of the US Department of Labor, released its annual findings regarding forced labor and child labor around the world at an event in Washington, DC.

These three reports (Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor, List of Goods Produced by Child or Forced Labor, and List of Products Produced by Forced or Indentured Child Labor) detail the industries and countries touched by forced, child, and trafficked labor.  The findings are more and more exhaustive each year.

Here is a summary:

• The 10th edition of the Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor under the Trade and Development Act report profiles 144 countries and territories and provides information on worst forms of child labor (WFCL) and recommends actions to prevent or reduce the WFCL.  To give you an idea, the worst forms of child labor can refer to children who are working in prostitution, as soldiers, working underground, and working underwater.  It also means that children do not go to school.  The ILO estimates that there are 215 million children around the world working in the WFCL. Read the new report here: http://www.dol.gov/ilab/programs/ocft/PDF/2010TDA.pdf

• The Department of Labor’s List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act list identifies two new goods and one new country for a total of 130 goods from 71 countries that are likely produced with trafficked and/or indentured workers.  Read the full report here:http://www.dol.gov/ilab/programs/ocft/PDF/2011TVPRA.pdf

Can you trust the social or environmental rating given to this company or product?

Kevin Thomas, Director of Advocacy, Maquila Solidarity Network

Over the past decade, newspapers and magazines, websites, commercial services and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have published all sorts of indices which rate, rank and measure company progress on corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues. Some of these focus on environmental issues, some on broad social and environmental performance, and some on internal governance and employee satisfaction. 

Can these ratings really tell you which companies are better at respecting labour rights than others? Can a
labour rights rating help you decide where to buy clothes, or where to invest your retirement savings? 

The short answer is “maybe”. A rating can tell you some things about a company, but it depends on what you want to know. When consumers, investors and others support or avoid companies based on their relative ratings on key indicators, it can help to drive changes. For that to work well, however, depends largely on the design and implementation of the rating system itself.

Can CSR ratings help improve labour practices in global supply chains?, a new paper published by the Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN) and the Project on Organizing, Development, Education and Research (PODER), examines the potential of rating systems to drive improvements in supply chain labour practices. Through interviews with CSR experts, representatives from companies like Levi’s, Gap and others that have been rated on supply chain labour issues, labour rights advocacy groups, and rating system developers, the paper highlights some key challenges facing rating systems and how some rating systems have tried to overcome, or at least minimize, those challenges.