Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/637797
64 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2016 LABOR MAT TERS Nestlé launched the investigation in December 2014, after reports tied brutal and largely unregulated working conditions to their seafood industry that have resulted in the rescue of more than 2,000 fishermen. Laborers come from Thailand's poorer neighbors, Myanmar and Cambodia. Brokers illegally charge them fees to get jobs, trapping them into working on fishing vessels and at ports, mills and seafood farms in Thailand to pay back more than they can ever earn. Nestlé said it would post the reports online as part of ongoing efforts to protect workers. It has pledged to impose new requirements on all potential suppliers and train boat owners and captains about human rights. It also plans to bring in outside auditors and assign a high- level Nestlé manager to make sure change is underway. "As we've said consistently, forced labor and human rights abuses have no place in our supply chain," Magdi Batato, Nestlé's executive vice president in charge of operations, said in a written statement. "Nestlé believes that by working with suppliers, we can make a positive difference to the sourcing of ingredients." Nestlé's disclosure is rare. While multi-national companies in industries from garments to electronics say they investigate allegations of abuse in their supply chains, they rarely share negative findings. "It's unusual and exemplary," said Mark Lagon, president of the non- profit Freedom House, a Washington- based anti-trafficking organization. "The propensity of the PR and legal departments of companies is not to 'fess up, not to even say they are carefully looking into a problem for fear that they will get hit with lawsuits," he said. STRONGER UNIONS CAN REBALANCE ECONOMY Thousands of striking Americans who work in fast food restaurants have provoked a broad debate over minimum wage levels, according to Dorian Warren in Newsweek, who writes, "From the beginning, the fast food cashiers and cooks who began the 'Fight for $15' campaign declared that they have a vision for how they can transform their jobs into work that sustains their families and frees them from depending on public assistance: a union. "They are not alone in uniting behind this vision. In an era of increasingly precarious careers and deepening economic insecurity, wide- ranging groups of working people — from adjunct professors to child-care workers to digital media journalists to auto-parts workers — are joining together to start new unions so they can speak with a more powerful voice about their future. "In a larger sense, all of these people who are working together to restart the union movement are pointing out something that should be obvious by now — that a grand economic experiment that America's wealthy corporate elites launched a generation ago has been a destructive failure for wage-earning Americans. "The implicit promise about this experiment that was made to the rest of us was that by crushing unions, corporations would be free to be more efficient, more flexible and more profitable. This was supposed to generate more growth and make life better for all of us. "Of course, that's not what happened. In reality, suppressing unions made it much easier for corporations to push the economy way out of balance. With nobody sitting across from them at a bargaining table, it became all too easy for CEOs to simply take more and leave the rest of us with less… "We need stronger unions again to raise wages and strengthen the purchasing power of typical families, because consumer spending is what will sustain and fortify our recovery from the 2008 financial crisis and into the future… "The fast-food strikes are just one sign that working Americans have been pushed to the limit and are eager to stick together to fight for economic stability. For sustained prosperity and a more democratic way of life, there is no substitute for making sure that working Americans have the freedom to build their own strong organizations to join together for jobs that make thriving communities possible." f Thai and other migrant slaves are being used on trawlers catching seafood in Thailand. Their catch has been sold by major American and European retailers. Much of it goes into cat food. Courtesy of Jay and Barry's Operations Management Blog