 So I'm really, really happy to be here at SOAS and a lot of my research, as Nitya mentioned, focuses on forced labour, unfree labour in the global economy. And I've really been influenced and love a lot of the excellent work that's done here at SOAS on those topics, such as by Alessandra, Jens Lert, different people in different departments here. And it's been really influential for me in my work. So it's really exciting to be here today and I'm really looking forward to the discussion. For me this seminar comes at a perfect time because I'm right in the middle of writing a new book and by the middle I mean literally three out of six chapters. So just at the point for any of you who have written books, you'll know that that's the point I think where you start to lose perspective on your full argument and you start to be a little bit buried down in some of the detail. And so it's an excellent moment for me to get some feedback and to get some ideas from you all and hopefully put me a little bit back on track with the work. So it's very much a work in progress and I'm really looking forward to your thoughts and ideas. So the book that I'm writing is a forthcoming with polity and it's a big picture book. What it really looks at is I'm looking at the slew of public and private governance initiatives that have emerged over the past five years or so to combat unfree labor and global supply chains. So as many of you will know the challenge of governing labor standards in the global economy today is very high, particularly as activists have become very adept at linking practices that they consider to be modern slavery or severe forms of labor exploitation directly back to the big brands who are leading some of these global supply chains. And so like Nike and Walmart. So to name just a few examples there have been several recent incidents. One was you may have seen in The Guardian, there was a big expose after a six-month journalistic investigation of widespread modern slavery in the Thai prawn industry. And there was also a documentation of how those prawns that were tainted by slave labor ended up in supermarkets like Walmart, Tesco, Costco, etc. Apple has recently come under fire for endemic debt bondage at some of its major factories in China. And skyrocketing death rates for workers constructing stadiums for Qatar's World Cup we keep seeing in the news. So there have been these incidents that have drawn international attention to the severe labor exploitation that's being fueled by discount driven consumer markets. And as activists and others have started to call for greater corporate transparency and accountability, governments have started to pass a whole wave of new legislation to address what they're calling modern slavery and to bolster transparency in global corporate supply chains. So in the UK last year in 2015, we had a new law called the Modern Slavery Act. At the same time as you've had all these public initiatives, you've also had all of these private initiatives. So companies have gone bananas really. They've just invested millions and millions of dollars in these new corporate social responsibility programs to tackle slavery. And they've expanded ethical auditing initiatives. They've partnered up with NGOs. They're doing all sorts of things to combat, prevent, and address slavery in their supply chains. Which is a market shift, I would say, from the previous years where companies have denied any responsibility or any, you know, link at all with these types of practices. But by most measures and across many sectors and regions, labor exploitation remains endemic. So what I was really interested in in this book is to really look at, you know, why aren't these governance efforts working? And more specifically, in whose interests are they working? And if has been widely documented by scholars, these types of efforts don't seem to be doing much to prevent or eradicate labor exploitation in global supply chains. Then what are companies and governments getting out of them? Why are they investing so heavily in anti-slavery initiatives? And relatedly, it raises questions about if these, you know, are the main governance efforts that are being taken to address labor governance in supply chains, and they don't seem to be working, what kinds of supply chain governance is needed to protect the world's workers and especially the most vulnerable ones. So just to say a little bit about my theory, the sort of theoretical interests of my book, as I mentioned, a lot of my previous work has focused on unfree labor. And my current project that I'm working on alongside this book, which is an ESRC project, is looking at the business of unfree labor in global tea and cocoa supply chains. So a lot of my work has been sort of really interested in the character and role of unfree labor within the global capitalist economy. I've looked specifically at prison labor in the U.S. state and sought to understand it in a historical perspective, et cetera. But in this book, I'm not focusing on the character of unfree labor. This is not a book about, you know, the unfree labor debates or the nature of contemporary unfree labor or its relation to capitalism. My theoretical concern in this book is much more in how the international political economy literature is dealing with the problem of labor standards and global supply chains. And so my theoretical ambition really comes from a dissatisfaction with the literature on global supply chains and global supply chain governance, which although in its early iterations in the works of people like Wallerstein and others, was centrally concerned with questions around power and distribution and agency, et cetera, and kind of big picture questions about global capitalism and production. In recent years, this literature has evolved on highly technocratic lines of inquiry, especially in regards to labor standards. So the starting point, there's just, you know, study after study after study that's sort of saying, okay, well, if we look at this initiative over this five-year period, what's not quite working about it, how could it be made to work better? So there's a lot of focus on sort of problem solving within these initiatives. The starting point is that globalization has created long, complex supply chains, and it's created a situation in which developing countries lack the capacity or the willingness to enforce labor standards in their factories. So we need multinational corporations who are at the head of these chains like Walmart and Nike, et cetera, to get in there and to raise labor standards along the supply chain. And we need Western governments like the U.S. and the U.K. to support and steer these efforts, such as through legislation that's going to strengthen corporate social responsibility. And this framing of the problem, I think, tends to overlook a number of questions that are important. One of them is the question of why supply chains have become so complex and so long in the first place, and the agency of companies and industry actors in reorganizing global production in this way in the first place. After all, corporations themselves have given rise to this complexity and also to very high levels of subcontracting within many product and labor supply chains as they've restructured production in recent decades to cut costs and reduce legal ownership to curtail their liability. So to put it simply, I'm interested in challenging some of the problems with how the global value chain theoretical approach conceptualizes the problems of labor standards governance. So for the sake of time, I'll just name three of my sort of bones to pick with this literature here. The first is that the literature tends to overlook the disproportionate power of industry actors in the inception design and implementation of both public and private governance initiatives. Secondly, it's tended to discount the role of states and corporations in actively engineering weak corporate accountability regimes that have been used to justify the rise of private governance. So the argument is, well, companies need to step in and they need to raise labor standards in the supply chains because there's no public governance. But that also tends to overlook the role of these actors and of political economic processes in actually creating those gaps in the first place. And third, there's been very limited recognition that many of the governance initiatives that they're focusing their studies on are not actually designed to address some of the problems that they're purported to address. And if you look at the structure of them very carefully, there's very little reason to believe that these corporate social responsibility initiatives are genuinely meant to do the things that they're said to do. And so I think we need to stop taking them quite as much on face value. And we need to think about how some of these initiatives are actually structured in ways that reinforce governance deficits surrounding labor standards rather than resolving them. So theoretically, I'm interested to build on global political economy scholarship, like the work of Claire Cutler, Suzanne Soderberg, Marcus Taylor and others who have really tried to emphasize and understand the politics and power dynamics of the shifts through which companies have become empowered to set and enforce their own rules. And I'm interested in the links between these anti-slavery initiatives and the broader sort of set of policy transformations associated with neoliberalization in the last several decades through which states have redefined their relationship to market actors. And I think that the anti-slavery sort of frenzy that's happening at the moment gives us some really interesting insights into those sets of processes. So in my presentation for the rest of today, I'm going to focus on three things. The first is how the business of forced labor is being understood and defined by the governments and companies who are setting up these initiatives. The second is on the corporate-led initiatives, so what I'm calling private governance initiatives, which are these corporate CSR types of initiatives. And the third is on recent public legislation that's meant to combat forced labor and supply chains, so that's like the UK's Modern Slavery Act, etc. Just to begin, I think it's important to understand how forced labor is being defined within these initiatives. So most governments and corporate initiatives are anchored in the International Labor Organization's 1930 definition of forced labor, which basically has two main components, that the labor is involuntary and that it is enacted under the menace of penalty. And there are a number of analytical and practical and political problems associated with this definition, which have been really, really well articulated in the unfree labor literature. So I'm not going to go into them here, but the point of bringing this up here is to note that the way that they're understanding the problem within these initiatives is as something that can be neatly separated from labor exploitation more broadly. So you have labor exploitation, then you have forced labor, and that's a separate problem. And it's one that can be addressed without necessarily needing to tackle labor exploitation more broadly. And following on from that, most of the initiatives, so when you read the company reports and you read the government reports, most of them are using the ILO's research to define the scope and prevalence of the problem. So according to the ILO, there's 21 million people subjected to forced labor today in the global economy, and they think that 18.7 million of those, roughly 90%, are exploited within the private economy, as opposed to by states or in forced sexual exploitation. The numbers are a little bit shaky. They've been criticized by scholars, but they're nevertheless the most reliable estimates that we have. And it's important in the sense that what they're conceptualizing as the problem is the fact that you have 18.7 million people who are being exploited in forced labor situations in the private economy. So that's by companies or individuals. And that is who they're trying to help with these initiatives. We also have a lot of much better data and information about the patterns of forced labor within global supply chains. And what we know mostly through scholarship and anthropology, sociology, business, and politics is that dozens of commodities are heavily dependent on various forms of unfree labor today. These commodities include coffee, charcoal, cocoa, fish, nuts, timber, diamonds, coltan, and several others. And then these commodities feed into the production chains of major companies, including those who are producing things like jewelry, computers, phones, and food that we buy at the grocery store just to name a few. And again, the evidence base here on the patterns of unfree labor within these actual supply chains is becoming quite good. So researchers like Neil Howard at the UI have done really good firsthand ethnographic work alongside victims of unfree labor and have then traced up the supply chain. So we're starting to understand the patterns around why and how unfree labor is emerging and is sustained within these types of industries. As I mentioned, the global value chain literature frequently portrays the problem of unfree labor as one where the problem is really that global value chains have become incredibly long and incredibly complex. And so even companies who really want to prevent and address forced labor in supply chains have difficulty doing so. So there's very often reference to this type of illustration, which is of a laptop computer commodity chain. And it is significant that if you have, for instance, an iPhone, it travels through roughly 200 different factories across dozens of national boundaries before it ends up being sold in a retail store. So there's a lot of complexity in terms of how goods are made. And that's frequently the main explanation for why it's been so difficult to tackle the problem of forced labor in these supply chains. So corporations and governments have framed the problem in this way, emphasizing that companies don't own these factories and production sites that create their products. And this undermines their ability to ensure that standards are flowing across these complex global networks. And finally, I just want to point out here that the notion that the problem of forced labor relates to shortcomings associated primarily with those supplier firms and also with governments in the global south is reflected in how the problem is measured and depicted by the international labor organization, companies, and other governments. So this is an international labor organization map from 2012, which relates to the estimate that I cited earlier, where they're showing that forced labor is appearing as basically a developing country problem. It's especially concentrated in Africa and in Asia. And there's really no mention and no emphasis on the fact that a lot of that labor concentrated within those industries is supplying into global value chains, as well as in domestic value chains, but that are tied to global economic relationships. So there's very much an emphasis on regions, and this is how this type of problem is typically portrayed. What is talked about a lot less often by government and by companies is getting into the main innovation and getting into understanding why global value chains have evolved the way that they've evolved. So for instance, the main innovation behind the global retail business model, which has been to allow companies to transcend nationally based labor and environmental legislation through various forms of outsourcing, various forms of subcontracting, and it's been allowing those companies to transfer risk, legal liability, as well as all of the duties associated with employment onto supplier firms. But then those firms very often receive a very small percentage of the profits associated with the goods that are being produced. So this chart shows the value distribution of an iPhone, an Apple iPhone, and the key here, I think that's really important is that you see Apple's profits are 58.5%. But if you're looking at the total labor, the total amount of value of an iPhone that goes to workers, you're looking at a very small amount, it's 5.3%. And then if you're looking at how this profit is distributed globally, you can see there's a little bit of profit over here for the supplier firms, but the vast majority of it is still concentrated with the company at the head of the supply chain. And that is why in the development literature, and especially Ben Sohlin's work, Nicola Phillips' work, and others, there's been a lot of attention recently to arguing that instead of global supply chains, we should be calling these networks global poverty chains or global exploitation chains, because structurally, they're perpetuating dynamics of inequality and of poverty and of maldistribution of value in ways that build in risks of labor exploitation, environmental exploitation, etc., because the margins are so low on certain portions of the supply chain that there's very little value to actually play with. So this part of the picture tends to be left out of the picture that's painted by companies and governments fighting modern slavery. Rather, they want to emphasize that modern slavery or forced labor is something that can easily be eradicated, and it can be eradicated without touching this distribution of value. They're not seeing this as a practice that's endemic in retail supply chains linked to these kinds of problems. They're seeing it as something that can be easily targeted and easily eradicated through corporate social responsibility. So I'm just going to touch really briefly on the research that I've done for the book, which you can see was quite a bit. I won't go into sort of all of the details, but what I mainly tried to do on my primary research was I interviewed policy makers, I interviewed industry representatives, and I interviewed NGO representatives across the UK, US, Canada, and China. And the reason for that was I was trying to understand how these public and private governance initiatives came about, how they were being implemented, what the role of different actors were within them, and what some of the problems were, why they don't seem to work. Then I also did a survey of consumer goods suppliers at the China Import and Export Fair in Guangzhou, China, where I surveyed the supplier firms who supply to the big brands, and I asked them about things like labor practices, different pressures that they were under, how much time they got to deliver orders, all of those types of questions, trying to understand the root causes of why some suppliers have a tendency to use sub-minimum wage labor. I then did factory visits of consumer goods suppliers, and then I did three industry-level case studies to try to understand and hone in on the patterns of how forced labor emerges in these supply chains. For secondary research, I really focused on the CSR policies that incorporate labor standards for the top 100 retail firms, and I also looked into some of the public legislation that's incorporated labor standards since the year 2000, and then I focused in on these audit firms that I'm going to talk more about in a moment. I really tried to understand what the role of the audit firms and their role within supply chain governance was, and finally I used evidence statements that were given to the UK Parliament last year by many Fortune 500 companies, as well as NGOs, which talk a lot about these governance initiatives and some of the shortcomings of them. And on the basis of this research, my main argument as follows, that the reasons that various governance initiatives fail are complex, so I'm not trying to say there's one reason that none of these are working to combat slavery. I'm not trying to say that they're equally ineffective across different sectors or across different types of governance initiatives or different parts of the world. I'm saying there is complexity and there is variation, but if we step back, which I think is important to do in the context of the literature being very focused on one initiative here, one initiative there, and not really looking at the big picture of how they're fitting together and what some of the larger problems are. I think there are two mutually reinforcing problems that stand in the way of improving labor standards in global supply chains, and that is that both the design and the implementation of these initiatives is severely flawed and limited in ways that tend to benefit the individuals and organizations who are profiting from labor exploitation but fail to protect workers. So let's look first at the private governance initiatives, so that would be the corporate social responsibility initiatives to tackle slavery. So as I mentioned, as part of this shift towards the privatization of supply chain governance and this benchmarking regime that's sort of arisen up to try to convey a sense of accountability and concern for labor standards within supply chains, industry actors as well as NGOs have taken on roles as monitors and enforcers of labor standards in supply chains through tools like ethical auditing. So ethical auditing is when say I'm Nike, I would hire an audit firm to come in and go look at and monitor the factories in other parts of the world. And this industry, which has sprung up to enforce corporate codes of conduct and labor standards and is paramount to the fight, you know, the fight against slavery is a very profitable industry. It's brought a lot of money into accounting firms to NGOs as well as to industry actors, but there's very little evidence to suggest that they're necessarily creating gains for workers. So in the last five years or so, you've had companies investing millions and millions of dollars in these anti-slavery initiatives, Colvin retailer Abercrombie and Fitch, for instance, claimed in 2010 to have taken proactive steps to mitigate risks of human trafficking and forced labor in their supply chain. Nike now claims that they have taken seriously the federal international efforts to end all kinds of forced labor. And essentially, you've had a shift where companies have gone from saying, we have nothing to do with forced labor. Forced labor is not in our supply chain. There's no possibility of forced labor in our supply chain to having companies sort of almost be in a race and competing with each other about their social responsibility initiatives in this area. And the main way that they're doing that, as I mentioned, is through this social auditing industry. Audits are now the primary tool that companies are using to try to detect and address forced labor in their supply chain. And so as I mentioned, auditing is essentially, it's a tool that the companies used to use for sort of internal governance, internal accounting procedures, and now they're using it as a governance tool purportedly to maintain labor standards and address problems in supply chains. And as I mentioned, it's a profitable industry. These are some of the auditing companies, I think often it's seen as a sort of technical part of supply chain governance, because you think, well, what could be wrong with hiring someone to go in and look at the supply chain? But actually, these are for-profit firms and they've grown dramatically in recent years. And there's also very little evidence to suggest that auditing is leading to concrete gains for workers. There's a lot of reasons for this. I'm going to go into three in particular. And those are going to be that there are limited detection of forced labor through audits. Then when forced labor is found, there's limited reporting. And then there tends to be limited corrective action. And I'm going to have to go through these relatively quickly, but I'm happy to come back to them in the Q&A. And the main point is to say, I think that what's often overlooked in discussions of auditing and enforcement in global supply chains is the fact that these brand and retail companies who are commissioning the audits are leveraging highly strategic control over the design and implementation of these types of programs. And as such, the ability of auditors to detect and address forced labor tends to be much more limited than people think it should be. So to start off with detection, as I mentioned, there's very little evidence to suggest that audits are an effective tool to detect forced labor. The main reason for that is that the retail company who commissions the audit, so that's Nike, Starbucks, whoever, they have full discretion over how deep within the supply chain the audit will go, which portions of the supply chain will be audited, etc. So as one of the auditors that I interviewed explained, we'll audit as far into the supply chain as the brand wants us to go. Many retailers, the vast majority of them only audit their tier one suppliers. So those are their biggest suppliers at the top of the chain, or they only audit a percentage of those tier one suppliers. So for instance, REI, which is an outdoor store based in the US, they audit only a small percentage of tier one factories in the supply chain, which amounts to roughly 27% of their total supply chain. And if we look at the pathway of these audits, it's not just about numbers, it's also about which types of factories they're auditing and which parts of the supply chain they're not auditing. So I want to make the argument that these audits and the pathways of these audits are structured in a way that usually conceals rather than brings to light the worst forms of labor exploitation that are taking place in the supply chain. So what do I mean by that? Well, if you look at the patterns that I was talking about earlier when I had the pictures of the commodities, and I said, you know, there's research that starts to give us insight into how and where force labor manifests in these industries. It indicates that the worst labor practices are not taking place among the tier one manufacturers where the final assembly is occurring, but rather they're concentrating along the lower ends of the supply chain in lower value added activities. So harvesting, processing, dying, finishing, etc. But these portions of the supply chain don't tend to be covered in audits. So one of the issues that's happening here is that actually as companies are starting to face more audits, so tier one factories, they've started turning to unauthorized subcontracting and contracting workers to limit their own legal responsibilities. So you've had more and more surveillance through the CSR programs on the top of the supply chain, and that's creating pressures for those companies to outsource work further down the chain, and especially to outsource the bad practices that they don't want to get picked up through the audits. So for instance, many of you might remember the Rana Plaza garment collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, and one of the, you know, informants I interviewed remarked, many of the brands that found themselves in that factory were as surprised as the next person to find their brand there, because their defense was we never gave work to that factory, the people who gave them the work was in the violation of the contract, and so there's, you know, sort of everyone turning a blind eye to the fact that a lot of the places that are being audited are no longer the places where the worst defenses are tending to come up and occur. So one of the directors of a UK audit firm that I interviewed was very candid about this and said, you know, at this point, the majority of supply chain monitoring programs aren't trying to find things out, they're actually trying to prove that something's not there. So they're very strategic in how they're building the pathway of their audits. Just to illustrate this point briefly further, don't worry if the diagrams are a little bit simple, PowerPoint and Word are not my strong suit, but essentially, if we imagine that P1 to P4 are a product supply chain, so let's say computers again, so you have the retailer and, you know, back here is like Coltan and the different minerals that go into a computer, and you imagine that the audit pathway is proceeding along the piece on the horizontal. The point that a lot of people made is that in many supply chains, forced labor and the worst practices are actually coming in through the labor supply chain, through labor subcontracting, through labor recruitment, through agency workers, through various different types of setups, where workers are not necessarily on the books of the core workforce that's being audited, and therefore there may not be records of the workers who are subjected to some of the worst forms of exploitation. Again, the patterns vary very much by different industries, they vary by different sectors. I'm not trying to say that it's all in everywhere the same issue, but by and large, I think if we step back, there is a tendency for the pathway of these audits to be built around the product supply chain, and especially the portions of the product supply chain in which the most vulnerable workers don't tend to be concentrated. So Apple recently acknowledged this problem, they refunded $4 million in back wages to workers who were victims of bond and servitude, which was essentially workers who had been charged by third parties excessive recruitment fees that were then used to hold them in situations of debt bondage while they were working within these factories, and it was really interesting in their report because they said, you know, yes, we've sort of been aware of this problem for a long time, but we didn't necessarily see this as part of our problem, but now we realize this is one of the core drivers of forced labor within our supply chain, and so we are going to tackle it. And interestingly, you know, Apple is one of the only companies that's gotten into the issue and encompass within its anti-slavery initiatives the problem of recruitment fees and debt bondage within its factories. Okay, the second weakness that I wanted to mention briefly is limited reporting. So what happens when you have forced labor that is detected by these auditors? Well, what it seems to me is that there's very little reporting of the problems of forced labor because the audit firms don't have any obligation to report the findings. They don't need to report them to the police. They don't need to report them to the public. They don't need to report them to advocacy groups. Rather, these private auditors are bound to confidentiality clauses to the companies who commissioned the audit. So that means that if you commissioned, you know, this auditor to go out and find forced labor in the supply chain and they find it, there's, even though that's criminal activity, there's zero incentive and there's actually a lot of disincentives from reporting that to any other party. And it was really interesting in the Modern Slavery Act debates within the parliament, IKEA used a report that some co-authors and I had written about this and about the problems of auditing to interview IKEA. Sorry, the parliament, one of the parliamentarians was interviewing IKEA, and they said, yes, that's how we maintain good relationships with our suppliers. You know, if these practices were made public, yes, we're suppressing criminality, but on the other hand, we wouldn't be able to do business if the audit reports were reported and things were made public. So once forced labor is found, there's a real tendency to suppress it. And many of the informants that I interviewed described that audit reports are confidential to the firm that commissioned them. And occasionally they're sent along to the supplier, but because the audit firms are businesses, their ability to report exploitation and forced labor is very limited. And so these things tend to be sort of pushed under the rug rather than put into the public eye. And finally, to touch on the third weakness just very quickly, my interview highlighted that there's very limited corrective action. So even when these things are reported and when careful records are made and the audit report clearly shows that there are problems, they're not necessarily addressed. So that was illustrated by several examples that have come to light recently where you've had audits, audited factories where problems have been reported and nothing has been done. And then there has been a catastrophe. So a good example here was the Rana Plaza collapse again, which made clothes for Primark and Walmart and others. And that factory was audited only a couple of weeks before it collapsed in 2013. Problems were found by TUV Reinhardt, the auditor, they were reported, and yet nothing was done. And companies continued to source from this factory until it collapsed. So I think that really highlights some of the problems. And again, just to emphasize the reasons for this are complex, but the main issue is that retailers are holding full discretion over when these audits take place, what is encompassed within them, what the methodology of the audit is, etc. Which is why I think one of the quotes I had was a very candid thing. He said even within, you know, the social compliance world, it's now standard operating understanding that audits don't actually achieve change within organizations. They don't work to create change. So it's interesting then that even though businesses are accepting that you have NGOs and governments increasingly adopting audits as a tool that they think is going to address the problem of forced labor and supply chains. So ultimately then I think we have to ask effective for whom is an important question here. These companies are using private governance initiatives like audits, and they're working for those companies. They're helping position those companies as responsible actors, but they don't seem to be doing much for workers. And in fact, there's a growing body of research that shows that they might be actually pushing problems further into deeper parts of the supply chain where it's even more difficult to find them and to regulate them. So then just to touch really briefly on public governance to make the story a little bit even more depressing because you think, well, that's okay. We don't expect companies to do much for forced labor, but the state's going to come in and really sort things out. But actually what we've seen is that at the same time as you've had these companies ramping up their anti-slavery initiatives in the context of growing pressure from NGOs, you've had all sorts of governments including the United States, Canada, the UK, passing legislation that is all about strengthening governance to combat forced labor. But interestingly, most of this legislation, even though it's purported aim is to require businesses to end slavery, has focused on criminal justice consequences for individuals. And where it has touched on business or supply chains, it's tended to be focused on triggering private governance responses. So governments have said, we're not going to tell you guys how to deal with the problems of modern slavery to companies, but you need to do something. And it's basically up to you to do what you want, and then you just need to be reporting on what you're doing. So we've had all of these different initiatives that NGOs have been really excited about, anti-slavery initiatives that are mostly pushing forward an agenda of transparency. So what's transparency? It essentially establishes a duty on some companies to prepare a slavery statement that reports on any steps they may have taken to address it. The problem with this is that it's viable to report that they're doing nothing. It's also viable to report very generally about the existence of their audit programs, or about corporate social responsibility more broadly, or their aspirational language about human rights. But it doesn't kind of hold their feet to the fire on specifics on what is the risk of forced labor within your supply chain, and what types of measures are you taking to mitigate that risk. And please show us some evidence that those measures are actually effective. Also, there's very little, there's essentially no punishment for companies who don't comply thus far. So we've had the California Act since 2012, the UK Act, and I'm not aware of any companies that have had any consequences for not publishing a statement. And the vast majority of companies covered under both sets of legislation have yet to release any statement. So on the one hand, we have all this action on modern slavery on anti-human trafficking, anti-forced labor. And that's very important. On the other hand, I think what's important to think about NGOs are really excited about this body of anti-slavery legislation. They think of it as a success. But it's also coalesced and kind of come alongside with the decline of normal labor inspectorates. And I won't go into this too much here. The important point is just to note that in the same period where there's been huge excitement about fighting slavery, there's been a real decline of resources and attention put into labor exploitation more broadly. So the average employer within the US now has a 0.001 percent chance of being expected within a given year, because you've had just a huge cutting back on labor inspection more generally. And a final point on this is just to say, you might think, okay, well, we don't need labor inspectors so much anymore because now we have these private auditors. But there are huge differences between auditors and state labor inspectors. I won't go into too much of that here. Happy to talk about it more in the Q&A. But the short version is that auditors, they can't investigate. They can't open lock drawers. They have no ability to impose sanctions. They have no ability to prosecute. So they can't launch criminal persecution or litigation to, for instance, get back wages for workers, etc. So auditors can only see the portions of the production sites that suppliers choose to show them. And essentially, even though state inspectors are not perfect, auditors are vastly less powerful and vastly less resourced in many ways than the state inspectors. So the point here is just to say, this is not a privatization of state functions. This is a displacement of the function of labor inspectorate with a much weaker governance tool. And that's really an important point. So to sum up, what is the problem with all of the anti-slavery legislation? The main thing is that there's been so much excitement about it and so much energy and attention put into fighting slavery. And it's very hard in some ways to disagree with that because obviously it's an urgent problem. It involves a lot of human suffering. It is important to address. But there's been a real tendency to overlook the substance of what the initiatives that are being passed are actually doing and what they actually require for businesses, which is very little. And also they don't tackle any of the underlying dynamics within the business model that give rise to forced labor in the first place. So especially that pie chart of value, how are you going to stop forced labor when workers are only getting 5% of the value of the entire iPhone? So it doesn't touch any of that sort of thing. It leaves all the business models that create a demand for forced labor purely intact. And it also does nothing to tackle the status quo of the retail driven economy in the first place. So just to conclude, it's a bad news story, but it's one that I think is important to put out there, which is that there's been a lot of hope and a lot of interest in these public and private initiatives to bolster labor standards and supply chains. But they're flawed and the approach that's being taken is flawed, both in terms of design and implementation. So in terms of design, they tend to emit the portions of the chain that are known to have the more severe forms of labor exploitation. They're focused on these tier one suppliers. And they rarely address the labor supply chain, which are these unregulated networks through which contingent and sometimes forced and trafficked workers are recruited, transported, and supplied to businesses. They also don't look at these shadow factories where unauthorized production is accelerating in the bottom tiers of the supply chain, labor subcontractors, or unauthorized factories or the informal sector. And recent governance initiatives tend to conceal and disclaim responsibility for these spaces rather than bring them to light. In terms of implementation, we have a similar problem. Most countries are scaling back public labor standards and spectrates. They're devolving authority to private actors to enforce their own rules. And you have a huge industry of accounting firms, social auditors, NGOs to some extent, who have emerged and are very happy to be monitoring and enforcing labor standards. But this enforcement industry seems to be helping companies. But there's very, very, very little evidence. And there's in fact a lot of evidence to the contrary that it's doing much in terms of detecting reporting or correcting severe labor exploitation. So I think that corporate governance or contemporary governance efforts are failing. They're not protecting the world's most vulnerable workers. And the prospect of strengthening these existing initiatives and the approach that's being taken are also bleak. So ultimately, I think we still have a problem, which is how to effectively strengthen and enforce labor standards in supply chains. And my argument would be that that's a political problem, much more than it's a technical one that can be solved by sort of tinkering around the edges of these supply chains. Thank you very much. Tag, is SOAS DEV studies all though a case? So please go ahead and do that. Okay. Thanks very much, Genevieve. I thought it was extremely good. It is extremely important. It's extremely detailed. And it is, of course, an extremely urgent problem. So this is absolutely fantastic for us. I'd like to ask a few questions, starting from very, very general issues. You started a presentation from the ILO definition of forced labor. And it seemed to be that the problem there was the definition itself expresses a dissatisfaction with personal coercion and a sympathy towards impersonal or market forms of the labor relationship. So the problem then for the ILO is not exploitation of labor per se. It's the personalization of the economic relationship and the direct compulsion. But the market compulsion, the impersonal compulsion is not a problem at all. So the idea implicit in the definition is to shift towards proper capitalist market relationships away from a distorted kind of capitalism that relies on the personal relationship of exploitation. So is this the framework, the dominant framework in which forced labor is understood? Now, if that is correct, then what is forced labor actually? Well, how should we see it if all capitalist labor is forced, all wage labor is forced in a systemic way? What is slavery if all capitalist labor is slave labor in a particular way, but it is not slave labor at all in a different kind of way? So what is it that we're actually talking about? So what is it that is exploitation of labor in global supply chains if all capitalist labor is exploitative in all circumstances? And it must be, and it must be so. So would we then eliminate the problem if you raised wages at the bottom of the chain by 50 cents an hour and allow the workers to leave? Does that resolve the problem? Should we be happy then and consider that progress? I'm sure if I were a work employee in that situation, we'll consider this progress, but is it sufficient? What else do we want? So is there a spectrum of poverty at the bottom of those chains and a spectrum of poverty across the working class in the world as a whole employed from the Apple store down Covent Garden all the way down the chain in the steps that you have described and different types of labor in this spectrum of labor, in this spectrum of poverty tied to particular chains and to the production of particular goods and services? Can we say this or not? And what is the peculiarity of those chains under neoliberalism? What is it that is necessary about those chains and those forms of labor and those forms of poverty? And what is it that is contingent? Is it just because of greed by particular retailers or by particular global manufacturers? Or is it a problem of that that neoliberalism weakened the representation of labor and this leads to the deterioration of the position of the workers at the bottom of of those chains? Or is it the problem of lack of development in particular countries that economic progress itself would spontaneously resolve? Now, towards the end, you described what you call the displacement of labor inspection, but is this is this a failure of governance? Or is it the mode of governance of particular production chains of specific goods and services under globalized neoliberalism? What is the systemic aspect of this? And if this is the case, then what goods and services are we talking about? Which ones? And which ones are not subject to these modalities of labor and this particular type of creation of poverty? Is there anything systemic again about this? And what are the other commonalities that we can identify other than poverty, forced labor, types of slavery, and so on? But in that case, what is it that attracts direct compulsion? Is it again just the attempt to lower costs? Or is there something else that is involved as well in that? But again, if this is the case, what kinds of governance initiatives in your final slide would be appropriate by neoliberal states and then effective to eliminate, to resolve, to address the problem in some kind of meaningful way? Or is it something that we have to say, nothing can happen because the world is really bad and until we overthrow global neoliberalism, nothing is going to happen and we should despair? Probably not. But what is it that can be actually achieved? And then why is forced labor, and to conclude, why is forced labor a problem today? Is it because we rebel against a particularly grotesque example of exploitation of a particular subgroup of people and in a way we're illustrating the problems with capitalism by looking at this extreme example? Or is it because we're being deflected against the systemic problem of capitalism by looking only at that particularly extreme example? What is it that we're looking at in this case? Thanks. Free labor is understood, including how Marxists have completely misunderstood what unfree labor is. I have a very nice theoretical framework, which is a feminist historical materialist framework to try to understand the role of unfree labor in the global economy, but I'm really trying to stay out of that here. But just for the purpose of this, I think I agree with you. I mean, yes, the problems with the ILO definition that have been really, really well pointed out by several people are many, but one of the main ones is that there's a complete normalization and a lack of problem of economic coercion and how economic coercion is defined and separated from other forms of coercion. So in a sense, labor is not considered involuntary under their definition if you have no choice but to work because you've been dispossessed of land or of the means of subsistence or of any other way of gaining your livelihood outside of money and markets. That's not considered to be forced labor. There's a real tendency to focus on types of labor that involve specific forms of coercion that can be neatly cut off, I think, from exploitation more broadly. And I mean, one of the main issues with that is that when you actually go and study workers, you end up in ridiculous situations of trying to decide whether somebody is a victim of forced labor, whether a victim of exploitation, because the reality is that labor relations are not that clear cut. They often involve ingredients of many types of different compulsions and many types of coercion and the economic coercion that's normalized within capitalism markets that applies to all workers can often be very extreme and can often be the driver that compels people to enter voluntarily into just egregious labor relationships, but then they're not identified as victims of forced labor and they don't even identify themselves as victims of forced labor because technically they consented to enter into this relationship knowing that the labor relationship would be exploitative in the face of just a complete lack of alternatives. So I don't disagree with your points on that. I think it is a problem and one of the problems kind of going to your last point is that why is there been such an excitement and a kind of obsession with modern slavery under neoliberalism? I think you're exactly right. It's because it's deflected all of the attention away from the normalization and spread and deepening of labor exploitation more broadly across the sort of spectrum of free and unfree labor I would say, so-called free and unfree labor and it's really interesting to see how it's such a kind of lightning rod of action and interest in modern slavery at the same time as things like workers' rights and kind of traditional questions around unions and collective action and other types of things have been completely marginalized and completely sort of sidelined. A lawyer in the US, Janie Chiang, is called this exploitation creep. I think that's a really good term because she's essentially saying there's been this focus on the tip of the iceberg and a complete neglect of the iceberg, which is labor conditions under capitalism more broadly. So I don't disagree with that. I also think your points about how neoliberalism has weakened the power of labor more broadly are very important and I guess in terms of the state I would say, you know, what's really important there has been this historical shift of a rebalancing of class forces within the state where, of course, you know, things like the decline of labor inspectorates. I'm not saying those are a governance gap. I'm saying that those are intentionally enacted ways of governing which is essentially a redefinition of the relationship between workers and employers whereby employers can exploit workers with relative impunity and that that has been a very conscious, very deliberate measure that has occurred in the context of many different states. So I don't disagree on those points. I guess just to come back to one of the final points you made about is this all just bleak and do we sit back and wait for capitalism or neoliberalism or both to fade away? No, I don't think so. I think, I mean there's a number of different things. One thing that that's a kind of conjunctural but very easy sort of thing that could be done right now by people who are interested in global supply chain governance is to listen to workers. There are these groups in all over the world. There's the coalition of Milwaukee workers in the US. There's the Asia floor campaign in the garment industry. There are groups of workers who are organizing who are saying if you want to do monitoring of supply chains and you want to do corporate social responsibility, let us do it. Let us have our own worker led responsibility initiatives and they have very effectively, especially in the US, managed to raise the price of labor. They've managed to secure better conditions. They've managed to secure better rights around collective action and to strike. And so I think that the question of supply chains even kind of on its own terms within that framework that we're operating in right now, there's already options within that. There's absolutely no reason to leave governing and monitoring of supply chains up to companies themselves when workers are actually on the ground and are being marginalized in a lot of these initiatives and are fighting and saying, look, we're happy to do this ourselves. So that's one of the things I'm interested to point out. I'll stop there because I want to hear other comments. That's number one, and that's the role and the impact and many representatives of this organization are interested in the production products, not workers' products. So what's your on their part in this? I had Alexander there. Thanks for making this great. I think at what point don't you think the gentlemen are in a different way? I mean, your brother is founded with the war on farmers actually and then one on the war on June. The first one, again, to how would you account for the fact that you have the compliance regime has been actually also very fruitful in large suppliers as well in a lot of countries. And a lot of facts in the last few decades, the emphasis on I think safety was one of the key sort of agreements that there was a kind of law. So the suppliers have to face the risk that, okay, they actually, that like yesterday you have an arama that's been, you know, the Turkish factory that's going, child refugees, too bad for them, they were caught. But in a sense, the fact that they focus on certain issues, the technical issues that work very well for countries as well, because it actually allowed them to have the shopping functions in the show. And the fact that they were completely at ease with the CSR model is shown by the facts that as a matter of fact, in India and mind the family in the Middle East, I think also, now a lot of the suppliers, they're not demanding for the dismantling of CSR models, they're demanding for incomprehension, for indogenizing it. So they want to run it because it's a sort of competition. So I wonder how you just account for this in your clarification. And the second one relates to Angiol. And I like you and mine a lot of, you know, wonderful people that just dedicate a lot of time to modern career initiatives and they're very sort of committed. But my friend says there are things in the minds of the sort of reduction of state in terms of the platform when you start to actually engage. And it's always on business terms. So in a sense like the modern slavery platforms, the global ETI platforms are increasingly unfinanced by business and they're increasingly only negotiated on business terms. Whereas the way it is, the buyers and the buyers are to be on board. So in a sense I'm asking you, what does it say about the such a moment itself in the last decade? So how do you see the evolution of the moment? Okay, should we stop back to the very big questions and come back in a sec? Okay, I'll go in reverse order while I have it in the top of my mind. I guess starting with NGOs, those are really good questions. I mean, I have written elsewhere in another kind of obnoxious, short polity book about the corporatization of activism, a book with Peter DeVern called protesting. And I think that those arguments that we made about how NGOs are under increasing pressure to work with corporations because of cuts and reductions in their funding, because of a kind of real closing up of the space for radicalism and many other circumstances that are pushing NGOs more and more into partnerships with industry, but also that industry are taking a different approach to how they work with these NGOs. And so they want to build into their sort of longer term growth strategy, certain types of collaborations and certain types of partnerships with certain types of NGOs and make a big deal of them. And that's part of how they're maintaining their sort of credibility and social license to operate. And we made that argument not just about sort of the supply chain types and the sweatshop activism as you've called it, but about activism more broadly in relation to social and environmental issues. And I think that those arguments apply. We're not trying to say that this is a sort of straightforward corporate takeover of NGOs, but we're saying that in the context of this real condensing of space for certain types of activism, they're choosing to partner up and work increasingly closely with industry. And there are good reasons to do that. Maybe incremental change within the system is becoming slightly more achievable. I'm not sure. People flag that as one of the benefits of it. But if you take a step back, there's a lot that's being left off the table. And we think that, you know, I think in relation to this book, the modern slavery agenda is leaving a lot off the table in relation to workers' rights and some of the more traditional issues and demands that NGOs have pushed for within this movement in the past. So I guess that's what I would say on that. In terms of the compliance regime, yeah, I absolutely agree that it's been fruitful for suppliers when I was doing the factory visits in China. I mean, and even at the Kenton Fair when we were interviewing suppliers, you know, one of the main reasons that I got into this project was because I was walking around the Kenton Fair and you'd see all the suppliers with their posters that would have all of the different certifications that they had managed to achieve, all of the different audits that they had passed. So it would say, we've passed Walmart's audit, we've passed Target's audit. And so we became really interested, what is the value of these certifications in these, you know, being able to pass different types of CSR initiatives to these suppliers. And so when we interviewed them about it, they were very candid and they would, you know, a lot of them saw them in business terms, they would say, well, if we have these certifications in these audits, we can access higher end markets, we can have higher margins, we can outsource more of our production, we can focus on the types of products we want to make. So there are huge advantages for those suppliers. And I think that's something I would need to bring out a bit more in my analysis and sort of how I set it up at the front end of the theorization. So that's really a helpful point. Back to your point. I guess you start with the part about the Veritas Intertech. I mean, they are focused, they've expanded their services in recent years. So they are focused on the end products, but especially Veritas, increasingly they're also doing more and more type social auditing types of projects and more and more service providing. So a lot of these firms have gone from specializing in say one type of audit or one type of service are now expanding. And so they've been growing very quickly. And part of the way that they've been growing is through purporting to and volunteering to implement and enforce and monitor these anti-slavery initiatives and other types of supply chain initiatives. In terms of collaboration with elites, I think that's a really great point. I'll have to think more about it. I didn't look at it very carefully in the research that I did in China, so I don't feel I'm in a good position to comment. But I'd be curious to get some of your thoughts on it more after as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'd love to. Okay, I guess I'll just pick up on some of these points. Thank you very much. Those are again three really useful helpful interventions. On your point back there, on, yes, I mean just the one that struck me the most was this, yes, the workers organizations are missing. That's in some ways deliberate. I'm trying to show how there's this whole industry and this whole sort of networks that are being built up around fighting exploitation and fighting slavery. And where are the workers within those? They're very rarely involved and in fact they're very often cut out or within international organizations like the International Labor Organization, which you would think would be an institution that would be in many ways dedicated to empowering workers and their voices. Even within that, they're facing a lot of challenges in getting a seat at the table and when they have a seat at the table and getting any kind of meaningful involvement in these types of initiatives. So I think that's right that you picked up on that and the truth of the matter is I think a lot of unions and a lot of different workers groups are really now catching on and embracing the kind of modern slavery agenda for a long time. They have been resistant to it because it's been seen as something that's been trying to marginalize their other concerns by focusing on the worst forms of exploitation. And now many of them including some of the groups that I recently worked with at the International Labor Organization's ILC convention on supply chains, it happened last summer. They've really taken on this sort of discourse of modern slavery and they're using it to try to make arguments and demands that they were trying to make anyway but they're now sort of using the political capital of modern slavery to push forward some of those agendas. And so I think that we're going to start to see more workers' demands to get involved in some of these processes and I think that that's a very good thing. In terms of the legality of audits I just also want to mention that there are a number of lawsuits and complaints against audit firms that I think are really interesting that are happening right now. There was a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse Cooper in the U.S. It just recently dealt with financial fraud not forced labor but and there's another one against TUV Rhineland who are the firm that audited the Rana Plaza Collapse Factory and these complaints are essentially really important because they're going to be some of the first times that the legal status of audit reports is actually going to be deliberated upon. So the audit firms have said we don't have a legal requirement to be accurate in our audit reports. We just have a legal requirement to do the audit and there's no obligation or need you know we can't be liable if we're inaccurate. And so the courts are actually looking at that right now. Do these audit firms have an obligation and a legal requirement for accuracy? And so that's a big sort of frontier that's moving forward so I would keep an eye on those lawsuits. In terms of the numbers with the ILO I mean let me speak delicately here. They have a whole methodology paper where they spell out how those numbers are collected and how they've come up with this estimate. As I mentioned you know there are a number of other estimates of modern slavery that have basically no statistical basis and no basis in evidence so there's a global slavery index which is produced by an NGO which purports to measure the numbers of victims of slavery in every country in the world down to the individual so it'll say there's 16,424 victims in this country or whatever. And those numbers are very problematic because they're based on a very small number maybe 15 to 18 national level surveys and then they've extrapolated to all of the other countries in the world on the basis of this 20 surveys so those are really not credible. By comparison the ILO numbers at least have a methodology behind them that's transparent and that's published and that you know statisticians and others have looked at but what's interesting about that number the 21 million number is that they I mean there's a few things. One is it's based on regional estimates so there's no national surveys that are involved so they're estimating by region they won't give country-level estimates of forced labor for the different countries in the world and then there's also these issues like duration right they don't specify how long did a person need to be a victim of forced labor to be included in the number. What about the people for whom economic exploitation the sort of forms of compulsion and coercion were very dire they're also not included in the number so a lot of people have really criticized that number for being exclusive and exclusionary of people who are in horrendous labor conditions all around the world but it's also been criticized on methodological grounds for various different issues like duration etc and they're coming up with a new number that I think will be out in 2017 or 2018 which will be their new global estimate which will be based on national surveys so they are doing the work of collecting you know doing national prevalence surveys and obviously it's very difficult to to do those right like you're trying to find something that you're trying to investigate a practice that's illegal that companies and governments don't want you to research so it is very hard to do that work but they are doing it and so we can expect a better number and better statistics to be coming out soon. Finally on the sector specific laws I think that's a really important point I think it's really interesting that so many of the countries who have you know almost every country in the world has made forced labor illegal right almost every country except for the US interestingly and a couple of others have signed on to the ILO's 1930 convention against forced labor and therefore forced labor is illegal within their countries many countries like the UK even have additional laws like the coroners and justice act that recriminalize forced labor so forced labor is illegal already within a lot of these countries I'm not a kind of lawyer but I do think it's it's kind of fascinating that then there have been this whole wave of anti-slavery legislation that make no reference to those existing laws and so I do think that especially if there's some folks who are interested in trade law who are interested in labor law who are interested in kind of national legislation it would be a really interesting thing to look at potential for kind of combining or using some of the laws that have a bit more bite behind them and that importantly have sanctions for non-compliance and thinking about how maybe those could be used or built into you know new forms of initiatives to combat forced labor. Not least for showing that the paraphernalia of CSI in auditing reproduces the status quo and I know that you're trying to avoid discussion of these issues in this book some degree through your response to Alfrena but isn't isn't part of the critique inevitably doesn't it inevitably involve the discussion of class relations in and around the production process, counterclass sources and source areas, labor control regimes even if you're not in this book talking about those things in precisely those terms. Should we do one more and then I think we can okay sure yeah I'd like to ask more about the state like you're talking about having kind of a level O in that story, I wonder if there are any differences we were mentioning between practices if anyone's doing anything more than what we need to know or is it really just it's the same stuff everywhere so it makes sense to just go and buy it on that level. Are there any more quick questions? Yeah I mean thanks so much those are really great points and I'll think about them all a lot. I think to answer quickly about the state yes there are laws on the books there's labor law there's all sorts of laws on the books in countries where suppliers operate and it's you know in some ways it's interesting that the focus has been on strengthening what's being called home state regulations so the the regulation from the countries where multinational corporations are incorporated as opposed to doing anything with the laws on the books in other countries and I think that that's something that needs to be thought more about and the whole sort of paradigm of home state legislation needs to really be looked at I think quite critically. Also in terms of the state you know within that sort of trajectory there are differences and that's a great question I mean Brazil is a really interesting example because Brazil you know not just made slavery illegal but they created sanctions so they they ramped up labor inspection and they created a blacklist so that any company who was found to be guilty of what they called modern slavery was banned from from doing business for two years in Brazil and they had this you know going strong for several years it's more recently I think come under fire because they've had a government change and there's been I think some concern that this is not making businesses very happy but you know there are models that states can adopt and that was a very good one at least in the time that it was going strong whereby it did seem to lead to concrete measurable improvements by creating a culture where you know companies couldn't just operate with impunity there there were consequences for the implementation of illegal labor practices. In terms of John's question I'm going to say yes I do need to think about those things and I'm still thinking about them maybe you want to help me I think that's all I'm going to say about that right now big questions still puzzling over how to address them in a way that is adequate that doesn't kind of completely overshadow the argument that I'm trying to make which is much more about the the sort of way that elites are handling this question and especially the kind of what companies are getting out of framing the problem of severe labor exploitation in this way and all of the sort of industry that sprung up around that I mean that's my main focus and main interest I appreciate the point that I can't completely skirt around you know the broader sort of class issues and and I'm not trying to but I'm trying to find a way to integrate that argument and a kind of coherent nuance argument about that that doesn't completely take away the focus from the questions of how CSR is being used to uphold certain types of relations so I'm still I'm still working on that and I'd welcome your input about how I could do that effectively in my book I guess maybe the last question just on the consumer the consumer question I mean I think that's a really tricky one I am it is the case that there are so many instances now of certified you know plantations or certified products that are fair trade that are ethically certified in some way that there are discoveries of of endemic sort of labor practices that are not good that do not meet the standard of those certifications on those farms or or plantations or worksites so I don't think they're a guarantee and I think it's really frustrating because you go to the grocery store and you think well I'll spend three more pounds on tea and you know you work hard and you make your extra three pounds and you spend it on tea thinking at least I'm not buying products made with forced labor but the reality is that I think a lot of those certifications are coming under scrutiny and I think that there's reason to be worried about the sort of industry that sprung up around them and where that money is actually going and that sometimes it's not actually going to to workers in terms of alternatives again that's a really tricky one I think that the more rigorous the standards are the better so there's huge variation for instance rainforest certification you know if you look up what they actually mean when they talk about labor standards it's extremely vague it's extremely aspirational that's very different to me in some ways than looking up a standard that would be a lot more rigorous and a lot more specific about what it is that they're auditing to etc so if you look at company codes of conduct or you look at some of these certifications you'll find everything from zero tolerance for forced labor to we aspire to better human rights and our supply chain right so just having a really you know doing a bit of research and figuring out what some of these certifications are and who's actually doing them and you know whether they have even a coherent set of practices that they're auditing to those types of things are very important because you'll find that there's huge differences in quality around those consumer facing labels and products so I'd encourage you to like look into that and share your knowledge with your friends and and everyone else um I think I'll leave it there that's a hopeful note right leave it on a hopeful note