US professor urges greater human trafficking awareness
Published:Thursday | February 14, 2019 | 12:00 AM
It is crucial for consumers in Jamaica and other countries to know how the goods and services they love are produced, for they may find themselves supporting and making richer the people perpetuating modern-day slavery, a United States-based professor has warned.
Delivering a lecture on Tuesday at the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean in St Andrew, Dr Roza Pati, the director of the Miami-based Human Trafficking Academy at St Thomas University’s School of Law, pointed to a host of industries, including manufacturing and fishing, as prominent for forced labour.
She bashed governments globally for failing to squeeze corporations where it hurts instead of simply compelling them to declare aspects of their activities.
Without calling names, she said a number of major companies were practising slavery.
“Corporations are absolutely using slave labour today. If you look at the numbers of forced labour estimated by the International Labour Organization (ILO), we are talking about 16 million people in private industries. Private industries would mean corporations. Corporations are still very powerful, and they are still carrying on with impunity when it comes on to human-rights violations, including slavery in the supply chain.”
Forced labour is everywhere
She continued: “You have forced labour in every corner of the world in various industries, whether it is fishing, agriculture, manufacturing, or construction. In the era we live, there is a lot of outsourcing. Multinational corporations all over the globe are supposed to let us know what they are doing to mitigate slave labour in their supply chain and their subcontractors, raw materials, and so on. Even with the United Nations principles on business and human rights, there is not much that has been achieved.”
To Pati, simply pleading to the moral conscience of companies “is not enough”.
“They should be under legal pressure to clean up their chain supply,” she said.
Pointing out that human trafficking is common on the high seas, Pati said that Jamaican fishermen were not exempt and should ensure that their fishing industry is taint free.
“I plead with each and every country, including Jamaica, that has a developed fishing industry to look into these kinds of businesses and make sure they are clean. You also have very small fishing enterprises that utilise forced labour. In the fishing industry, a lot of trafficking goes on. Slave boats out on the high seas have been out there for decades. You then have commercial ships that go there,” she said.
Deputy Superintendent Carl Berry, who heads the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Unit within the Jamaica Constabulary Force, says that while Jamaican fishermen should exercise caution on the high seas, there is no imminent danger. As such, there is no need to panic.
“There is no evidence to point to a particular group in our neck of the woods to say these are targeted groups, but everybody is vulnerable. Our data says that the one and two people who may have drifted away, and found elsewhere, drifted when engines failed. There is nothing alarming in that regard. We have never heard a family say there is a fisherman still outstanding.”
A 2017 report by the ILO said that 40 million people were confined to modern-day slavery in some way. Twenty-five million were victims of forced labour while 16 million were forced to work in private economies. Twenty-three per cent of victims trafficked to work as slaves were migrants, the report stated. The ILO has valued the profits from forced labour at roughly US$150 billion globally.