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Hello. Thank you for joining us. We're proud to welcome you to our special series, In Chains, Brought to You by Bro, where we talk about the history and the current state of slavery and human trafficking. I'm your host, Lee John Greco.
Today we're speaking with Dr. Alexis Aronwitz. She's the author of Regulating Business Involvement in Labor Exploitation and Human Trafficking. Dr.
Aronwitz, thank you again for joining us this morning. Thank you for having me. So you talk in this article about government-led regulations, industry-led regulations when it comes to combating forced labor. But I want to open up with what the workers have done in this movement.
You talk about workers who filed a petition through Change.org claiming they were victims of forced labor at CJC Food in Louisiana, which produced seafood for Walmart. And ultimately, Walmart suspended its contract as a result of this and the Department of Labor investigated CJC Food. How do you rate the effectiveness of worker-led measures over legislation and supply chain monitoring? That's a very good question.
And I think it's difficult to answer. Most of the time, workers are not in a position to assert their rights. Very often, they may be working in foreign countries. They may be undocumented migrants, so the risk of being arrested and deported if they complain.
Of course, their integrity needs to be protected. Their lives need to be protected. So consequently, by themselves, they have very very little power. However, if they receive the backing of either international organizations, the national or NGOs, or the press, I think that they have enough power to regulate and make a change.
And in the case of CJC Food, they were supported by an organization that fought for their rights. They helped them produce this petition that they brought up on Change.org. And a result of 100,000 signatures, they were able to gain the attention of the press and effect to change. Walmart did cancel its contract with CJC Food.
And as a matter of fact, the US government made a ruling requiring that the company pay remunerations to the workers later. However, that often doesn't happen. I'd like to call your attention to what's going on in the Gulf states right now. The Guardian actually is the document against the here.
So the press is also extremely important in calling attention to the public of some of these abuses going on in companies. But the press is documented for years. The abuse is going on in the building of the stadiums for the 2022 World Soccer Cup. Thousands of workers from East Asian countries still from India, from Nepal, from Surma, have died during the building of the stadiums.
There have been other reports of human rights abuses in the building of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Museum and New York University. And these abuses have been documented by human rights watched by the ILO and international trade union confederation as well as the press. And I think it's only at that point that we are able to really protect workers' rights if we can even get to that point. I don't think that we've done enough to protect the rights of workers in the Gulf states.
I think also we as consumers play a very, very important role in all of this. We are the ones who create the demand. And whether this demand is for sexual exploitation, children, sexual exploitation of young men or women, or whether it's debauch, clothing or chute food, we are the ones ultimately responsible in the supply chain for the abuse of workers. And I think until we are educated and we start demanding that companies from whom we purchase our food and our goods recognize and respect the rights of human workers, I'm not sure that a lot will be done about that.
We don't realize how much power we as consumers as fans, as purchasers of products in influencing companies. Companies care about their reputation. And the reputation of loss for large companies is so...it's a death knoll for them. And it's a very similar case involving Hershey's chocolate where there was a petition over the number of chains that were forced to force Hershey's chocolate to ensure that there was no force to labor or child slave labor used in production of their cocoa.
And Hershey's actually capitulated and agreed to purchase these sustainable chocolates. So there have been newest cases of companies that have after negative press changed their own goodness, changed how they obtain products for the supply chain. So we do have a role in all of this. And I think this is why it's so important that we are educated about human trafficking and about human rights and abuses in the labor of supply chains.
Let's actually talk about chocolate a little bit more specifically the cocoa industry. Because I think it's important that we know to our listeners that, yes, while Hershey's chocolate, that's a good example of a business that has sort of rited the ship so to speak when it comes to human rights abuses, that the international cocoa industry, as you note in this article, still has major problems. You know that despite multi-stakeholder initiatives, multiple rounds of funding, child and forced labor remains a problem in the cocoa industry. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about legislative initiatives like the Harken angle protocol, which came out of the US.
What did that aim to do and why did it ultimately fall short of its goal? The Harken angle protocol really intended to stimulate the industry itself to commit to fulfilling the intent of the legislation of providing American consumers with a reasonable assurance that no child labor was used in the production of chocolate products. So it really was not to punish the industry, but to stimulate them to take the initiative to regulate labor and ensure that child labor was not used. I'm talking about the I-Lab report.
The Bureau of International Labor Affairs produces a report from the Department of Labor every year looking at goods in different countries that are produced with child and forced labor. And the report that I refer to in my article was the 2016 report, and in this report the I-Lab identified 139 goods in 75 countries that were produced with either child labor force labor or a combination of both. And unfortunately, the 2020 report that was released in September 30th, since it was a very recent report, identifies 155 goods in 77 countries produced with child and forced labor. So actually they've identified more goods in more countries.
I went back and looked at the countries that I had identified that were using child and forced labor in the production of cocoa, and all of these countries are still identified as countries involving either child labor or forced labor. So it appears that we're not making the progress that we would like to be making. But there's something very interesting about this report, and this report identifies the most reasonable report, 218 million children working. These are estimates worldwide.
And of these 152 children have been identified in child labor. And of these 73 million children have been engaged in hazardous child labor, and the report goes on to say that we don't have estimates for the most hazardous forms of child labor that are identified in the ILO Convention 1 and 2. I think you can put child labor, working children, child labor, hazardous child labor, and the most extreme forms of hazardous child labor on a continuum. I think what we're seeing is this.
I think there have been improvements in the cocoa industry. I don't think that we're there yet, but what has to happen is this. We can't just simply ban child labor, move children off of cocoa plantations, and not find a way to support the families whose children have been working on these cocoa plantations. I was doing some work with the UN in Africa a number of years ago.
We were talking to the representative from EPCAD International, and excuse me, from New South. And this individual said to us, you come down here to Africa, and you tell us that we need to eradicate child labor. But what you don't seem to understand, because you're coming from western countries where child labor is prohibiting, what you don't understand is that if we ban child labor, families don't eat. And if we take children out of fields, if we take children out of markets, if we take children out of other areas where they're working, we're liable to put female children at risk of being prostituted.
So he said, our goal in UNICEF is not to ban child labor, but to find some sort of a balance between children working in non-hazardous jobs and being able to help support their families while they're also going to school. So what we really need to find out now is whether or not children who prior to the Hargan angle protocol, the priority intervention of the large childhood companies, whether these children were exposed to extremely hazardous situations. If you read some of the reports of organizations that were doing work done there, that was the case. There is monitoring going on.
Some of these reports indicate that there are fewer children found on these COVID plantations, and when they are found very often these children are the children of workers on the COVID plantation. So there is some form of supervision by the parents. The conditions for children appear to be better. However, that's it.
I want to say there are a number of sort of voluntary certification schemes. So we have now in different parts of the world the Ray Farce Alliance Sustainable Agricultural Standards. So you'll see Ray Farce Alliance stamped on chocolate bars, this grant fair trade certification standards, UTZ, which is the one that we have all over Europe. I don't think I bought chocolate in the last two or three years that has not had UTZ stamp on it.
And of course, Starbucks has its own co-host standard. So there are any certification schemes that are supposed to monitor the supply chain. So it's not being said, there are a number of problems with this. Number one, when the monitoring occurs, is this monitoring done by the companies themselves or are these third party monitors?
Are these NGOs possible that are coming into to monitor the conditions? Because of course, the question is whether or not companies actually understand that human rights are used to understand what it is that they're even looking at. So does monitoring occur? Who is doing the monitoring?
Is the monitoring unannounced? Because if you don't have unannounced monitoring on these co-cult adaptations, you are now monitoring the children disappear and then a day later they're brought back to be exploited. So you need to have unannounced monitoring. And of course, the other thing that you're willing to have put in place is that if children are identified, you need to be able to rescue them, remove them, and rehabilitate these children.
That means sometimes children need to be given birth certificates. They need to be given the families, they need to be given money to help support them. And I'm not sure that that's what's actually occurring in the industry. So until we can find a way to supplement the income of the families, maybe there were still seeing families sending out children in the cocoa industry to work.
I do believe that we have made progress, but I don't think that we're there yet. I want to move over to the United States where you highlighted two training programs that you said were very successful in recognizing the signs of human trafficking. Now, was the truckers against trafficking and the blue lightning initiative, which trains airline personnel? Can you just talk about those two programs, what they do and how effective they are?
Absolutely. But these two programs, I find these two programs very different because they're both very, very different. One is a bottom up industry initiated program, that's the truckers against trafficking. And the other was a blue lighting program was a collaboration between numerous US government agencies at the airline industry.
So that was really always a top-down approach. That was part of the FAA expansion safety and security act of 2016. Okay, and that act required all air carriers to provide initial and annual flight attendant training regarding recognizing and responding to potential trafficking, human trafficking victims. Okay, so these are actually very, very different programs.
I will say that it's very, very difficult to assess the measures of these programs to accomplish. And one of the reasons is because it's very difficult to measure what you have prevented. Okay? So basically with what we're dealing with in both of these programs is anecdotal evidence of success, meaning that the truckers against trafficking has identified a number in their name report annually on their programs.
They talk about a number of victims who were actually identified by truckers. There was a case of airline, airline stewardess, flight attendant who saw a child on a flight, potential month flight actually, who apparently the guardian didn't seem to be terribly concerned about their well-being. She found that very suspicious and undergotten strain reported it and has resulted in investigation of the US government was able to uncover a major trafficking ring bringing children from South America to the United States to be exploited. So we do have anecdotal evidence that these programs have accomplished what they want to do.
However, what we very often are looking at are proxy measures of effectiveness. And by this we look at the number of people trained. So we can talk about tens of thousands of people trained, but are we actually accomplishing what we want to do? Have we actually rescued any victims?
Okay? So we have a number of calls to national hotlines or local police. The calls that go into the national hotlines or the local police are very often suspicions or tips that may or may not result in arrest or arrest your victims. We hear about them when they are successful, but we don't of course hear about them when they are not successful.
So even if you look at the national tick line or the national hotline anti-trafficking hotline, you'll see a number of calls coming in, but you don't necessarily see what happens with those calls. And in that sense, I think it's difficult to measure the success of any of these programs. That having been said, if we didn't have those programs, those few people that were actually identified and rescued would not have been rescued. So I think that we need to have these programs, but I think it's difficult.
I think we're always looking for numbers. We're always looking to quantify the success of our programs. And that's very, very difficult to do in human trafficking. There are a number of other programs that I'll talk about in just a second, but I will say the inability to apparently measure success is due to a lot of public data.
So we don't know how many victims there were before we trained airline personnel and how many victims there are after we train airline personnel. One of the reasons why it's so difficult to measure success of these two programs or any of the other programs is because we don't have baseline statistics, so we don't know what trafficking looked like prior to the implementation program and then measure the same phenomenon after the implementation program to see whether or not there's been a reduction in the number of trafficking cases. We don't have accurate statistics at all to begin with. The number of people that are actually identified by NGOs or police and law enforcement agencies really is simply the tip of the iceberg.
Estimates are astronomical compared to the actual number of victims that we identify. So we're working sort of in this vacuum. We don't actually know what the numbers are. We don't have baseline statistics.
Victims themselves are unwilling to come forward. So there are situations in which individuals have been identified as presumed or suspected victims of trafficking and they themselves refuse to self-identify, meaning they refuse to admit that they are victims of trafficking that are being exploited. That's how law enforcement agencies, this is my boyfriend, this is not my parent, this is not my trafficker. They may do that because they are unaware of the situation because they're afraid of repercussions or they're afraid of harm that may come to themselves, their family, their children.
So consequently, we're sort of working in a vacuum. What we're doing is looking at proxy measures. So instead of actually looking at the number of victims that we're rescuing, we're looking at the number of truckers who have been trained, the number of individuals in hotels that have been trained. We look at the number of brochures that we hand out.
The number of podcasts we do or the number of conferences that we hold. And this is how we measure the success of programs, but it's very, very difficult to get. What I would like to see is number one, how many victims are we actually rescuing and what are we doing to help these victims after they identify them? And I'm really glad that you brought up that point because I think that is one of the most difficult things for people to comprehend when it comes to human trafficking and human smuggling is just how covert this is.
And the fact that like you said, there are no numbers before and after showing how many people are trafficked versus how many people are saved. I find that again and again, as a journalist, I'm asked by other journalists when we're working on stories about human trafficking in the US. How many people were trafficked this year versus last year? And really, it's hard to quantify that, as you said.
And so I think you explained that quite nicely there. I'm glad that you asked this or mentioned this because this has always been something that sort of perplexes me. I did a presentation at a conference for the OSCE years ago and I was contacted by one of the UK newspapers that white numbers and I said, I want to give you numbers. I spent the second chapter of my book criticizing the numbers.
I said that I can tell you about why the numbers are so inaccurate, but numbers only uncover what we're willing to invest in and look for and find. And so, you know, if you don't want to have a trafficking problem, you just don't look for them. You don't look for victims, I don't want to have a trafficking problem. The numbers will be very low.
And the Netherlands has for years been a very small country, but 17 million inhabitants, we've always had more trafficking, identified more trafficking victims than most of the surrounding countries with populations four times our size. And in part because we have an independent national rapporteur which reports to the government on this, we have trained judges, we have trained labor specialists, we have trained police to look for trafficking and we also identify presumed victims of trafficking, not confirmed, meaning that even if a victim says, I'm not a victim of trafficking, this is my boyfriend, I'm working as a prostitute, you know, I give him all my money, but he's still my boyfriend, that person will be recorded as a presumed victim of trafficking. We have invested so much energy in trying to uncover trafficking in our country. Our numbers are very, very high compared to other countries that don't have the political will, that don't invest the training in police and labor and specterates and maybe their legislation is not good.
They just think we have much lower numbers. So, you know, numbers are, numbers are fluent. If you uncover a very, very large trafficking operation and we've had some of these in the United States, particularly labor exploitation, it's kind of much, much larger than sex trafficking operations, there was one that I profiled in one of my studies looking at, I think in the American Samoa, I would have to check on the team. And there were 250 people being exploited in factoring.
This is going to shift the numbers dramatically from one year to the next. So there are numbers that are published in the US Department of State Trafficking and Persons Report and there's an actionable trend. You can see the numbers, you know, of victims and number prosecutions, which are extremely low, very disappointing. But the number of victims, the fluctuation rate from year to year, they generally have been climbing over the past, let's say, 10 years, but this is worldwide, 70,000, if I remember correctly, 70,000 victims.
And you know, the UN reports also in the tens of thousands, but yet the ILO in conjunction with the Walk Free Foundation estimated 24.9 million people in modern day slavery a couple of years ago. But what we're talking about is actual uncovered cases in tens of thousands to estimates in the millions. I think the truth is somewhere in between now. Well, I'm so glad you were able to delve into this.
I really hope that more researchers, more journalists and just anyone will listen to this episode and dig into your article because feel that there is a lot of interest in human trafficking and sex trafficking right now, in part because there's so much misinformation out there and disinformation out there about human trafficking that is going on. So I hope that people get the chance to read your work, understand a little bit more than nuance behind that and understand as we mentioned, you know, there's more than just the numbers when we're talking about human trafficking. I'm going to push something on your listeners. I'm really extensively on human trafficking and a lot of what I've written can be downloaded, including my book, can be downloaded for free from the internet, if you type in my name and human trafficking, even as a read the book will pop up on Google and you can download that for free.
And if you go on to academia.edu, you can also download articles, not just mine, but the countless articles on human trafficking, all for free. So you don't have to have a subscription to extensive journal. You can download a lot of these articles that academics have uploaded to academia. Well, that's a good place to end it, always nice to end with a good plug.
Alexis, thank you so much again for taking the time to speak with us today. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. And I hope your listeners have learned a little bit more about human trafficking. Dr.
Alexis Arunwets, she's author of Regulating Business Involvement in Labor Exploitation and Human Trafficking.