Slave Next Door (33 page)

or slave-made goods is a serious crime, why are we confronted daily

with slave-made cotton, steel, coffee, sugar, wood products, cocoa,

clothing, gold, diamonds, jewelry, and other goods and commodities? It

is not as if the law were vague or confusing. Strip away the legalese and

American law boils down to this: no slavery in any form, no profiting

from slavery in any form, no bringing in or selling the products of slav-

ery in any form; end of story.

B I T T E R S W E E T

Finding a way out of this mess for American companies and consumers

will not be easy—but the recent actions of the chocolate industry give

us a good example. In 2001 a film made for HBO and British television

exposed slave labor on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast. The footage of

young African workers, their backs scarred from whippings, in terrible

physical condition after being freed, hit the chocolate industry like a

bomb. As they began to get over their shock, chocolate company exec-

utives started to assess what they could do about the problem. The chal-

lenges were great: almost half the world’s cocoa comes from the Ivory

Coast. This meant that an immediate boycott of cocoa from that coun-

try would have cut world chocolate production in half, as well as

destroyed both the economy of that country and the livelihoods of the

majority of farmers who didn’t exploit slave and child labor. In addition,

there was no immediate way to tell which of the country’s six hundred

thousand farms had slave labor and which didn’t, or which cocoa beans

were tainted with slavery and which weren’t. In the Ivory Coast, choco-

late companies are not allowed to buy directly from farmers. The gov-

ernment controls the supply chain, sets the price, and requires companies

to buy from registered exporters. By the time the cocoa reaches the

export warehouses, all the slave and free cocoa beans are mixed together

and indistinguishable.

While consumers pressed for answers, the chocolate companies

scrambled to discover what they could do that might be effective.

Slavery, after all, is illegal in the Ivory Coast; and the chocolate company

executives asked why was it
their
responsibility to enforce the laws of a

foreign country. Meanwhile, the government of the Ivory Coast was

angry about having their main export threatened by reports of slavery

and abusive child labor on a few farms. They also resented calls for the

U.S. government to somehow intervene to stop the slavery—not because

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they condoned slavery but because they didn’t like foreigners trying to

tell them how to run their country.

Let’s think about the shoe being on the other foot. Having read chap-

ter 3 of this book, you know there is slavery in agriculture in South

Florida. Now imagine that the government of Ivory Coast announced

that it was sending inspectors to Florida to check up on slavery in the

tomato fields and orange groves. These inspectors would check farms,

interview workers, look for violations, and then decide if America

would be allowed to export their tomatoes and oranges. The U.S. gov-

ernment would never allow such a thing; in fact it would be taken as an

insult and a provocation. Although Ivory Coast is not a rich country

and its government makes mistakes, that doesn’t mean that its citizens

shouldn’t run their own affairs. When you consider that Ivory Coast

only gained its independence from France in 1960, it’s understandable

that they might feel touchy about a rich and mainly white country telling

them what to do.

The breakthrough on cocoa slavery came when staffers working for

Senator Tom Harkin and Congressman Eliot Engel decided more could

be achieved by cooperation than confrontation. Using an amendment to

the Farm Bill as a lever, they got the main chocolate companies together

with antislavery organizations, consumer groups, trade unions, and

anti–child labor agencies. After tough negotiating, all these groups

agreed to a kind of treaty. Alternately called the Harkin-Engel Protocol

and the Cocoa Protocol, it committed the chocolate industry to work

with all the other groups to uncover the amount of slavery and abusive

child labor, to fund a foundation aimed at getting slavery out of cocoa,

and to develop a way to ensure that no chocolate came from slave or

child labor. The protocol was a historic document, the first “treaty” to

be struck between an entire industry and the antislavery and anti–child

labor movements in the more than two hundred years of their existence.

The result is the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), a foundation

based in Geneva and including the European chocolate companies. The

ICI mounts projects in West Africa aimed at taking slavery and child

labor out of cocoa. The chocolate companies have put more than $10

million into this work since 2002, money that would never have gone

into antislavery work without the protocol. Working the governments of

Ivory Coast and Ghana, the ICI constructed a system for inspecting and

certifying cocoa, completing the first tests of the system in the summer of

2008. This inspection and certification is tricky since there are more

than a million cocoa farms in the region, and who, exactly, should be the

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group or government that “certifies” that cocoa is slave-free? The certi-

fier needs to be independent, whereas the farmers, exporters, chocolate

companies, and even the governments have a big stake in their cocoa

crop. Exactly how to inspect and police the farms will take time to work

out; sooner is better than later, but at least for cocoa, unlike the other

commodities flowing into the United States, there is a vision and a plan.

It is the basic idea of the protocol that is so important—that compa-

nies take responsibility for their product chain and work with other

groups, including consumers, to clean it up. Since the protocol was ham-

mered out, both Ivory Coast and Ghana have developed programs and

asked for foreign help to address their child and slave labor problem. The

protocol has also shown how two U.S. politicians could use the bully

pulpit of their office to fight slavery around the world. The protocol

process is aimed at taking slavery out of a single commodity, cocoa; if

this method is successful, it will be a tool that can be used on the other

products that bring slavery into our homes. Other industries are looking

at the protocol model as a way to clean up their product chains, and

when the cost of this work is spread across a whole industry, it doesn’t

dramatically affect the bottom line or the prices paid by consumers.

M E A N W H I L E . . .

While procedures like the Cocoa Protocol are worked out and adapted

to other commodities like steel, cotton, sugar, and coffee, how can

American consumers ensure that they are not buying into slavery? At

present, it is hard to know if slavery is in the product you want to buy.

“Big box” retailers may know which goods they have imported from

Chinese prison factories, or they may not; either way they are unlikely

to say. Car companies, grocery store chains, coffee shops, and clothing

manufacturers all face the same problem the chocolate companies faced;

their raw materials contain some slave-made ingredients all mixed in

with legitimate ingredients. Until each of these industries steps up and

takes responsibility for the labor link in its product chain, Americans

will remain in the dark, knowing the origins of only a handful of prod-

ucts and sources. It is impossible to make an ethical choice about every

single purchase. The question is: How do we focus our consumer power

in a way that is realistic? Every industry, every company, has to listen to

its customers or face disaster. As the last link in the product chain, con-

sumers have considerable power. By speaking in one voice, consumers

can bring enough pressure to bear to remove the slavery ingredient from

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the things we buy. Calling on the companies to work together with con-

sumers and human rights groups to find solutions to the problem can

achieve this. Smart companies know that unless they take responsibility

for monitoring their product chain and eliminating the element of slav-

ery from their stock, sooner or later they can expect a serious downturn

in sales. Antislavery organizations are needed to keep a firm grasp on

what is happening on the ground.

There are ways to get businesses to do the right thing. Consumers in

England wanted the big grocery store chains to work harder to get slav-

ery out of the food they sold, so they mounted a simple but effective

campaign. Thousands of families saved the long receipts they were

handed at the grocery store checkout stand. Every month they would

attach those receipts to a letter to company bosses. The letter read some-

thing like this: “You can see by the attached receipts that we buy our

family’s groceries at your store. We like shopping at your store, but we

would like it a lot more if you would remove slave and child labor from

the food and other products we buy.” The response from the grocery

companies was swift and positive.

You can also be sure you are not buying into slavery with some prod-

ucts if you buy “Fair Trade” goods. Fair Trade goods, like coffee, choco-

late, sugar, tea, nuts, bananas, honey, and rice, are inspected and

certified by an independent foundation. The basic aim of Fair Trade is to

get farmers and artisans in the developing world a fair price for their

crops or goods, one that allows them to send their kids to school and

have a decent life. The inspection system means that slavery doesn’t

come into the product. Fair Trade goods can be a little more expensive,

since the farmer is getting an agreed-upon and sustainable price as

opposed to a market rate that can sometimes be below the cost of pro-

duction. While Fair Trade doesn’t get the publicity of most retail prod-

ucts, you don’t have to look too far to find it. Fair Trade coffee, for

example, is available at Caribou Coffee, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best,

Safeway, Giant Foods, Target, Dunkin’ Donuts, and many other shops.

As more people buy Fair Trade goods, the system expands to cover more

producers and more products coming into the market.

The clothing company American Apparel takes a slightly different

approach. Based in Los Angeles, the company has a vertically integrated

supply chain—meaning that almost all the steps in producing their

clothes are taken in the same place by the same company. By assuming

a hands-on approach to their product chain and trying to control as

much of it as possible, they stop slavery from creeping in. Much of their

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clothing is available in certified organic cotton as well. Levi-Strauss and

other clothing companies have taken still another approach. Working

together, they have set required standards for their own factories and all

the companies that supply them. In 2008, these companies were work-

ing their way down their supply chain, step by step, setting up systems

that would eliminate the sort of problem that occurred with the Gap’s

subcontractor in India.

Yet another approach deals with one of the best known of the slavery-

tainted products, handwoven rugs produced by child slaves in India,

Pakistan, and Nepal. More than one hundred thousand children are

thought to be enslaved in this way, locked in tiny sheds, fed little, forced

to work long days, beaten and abused. These rugs are a major export of

the region; Pakistan alone exported to the United States more than two

hundred million dollars’ worth of handwoven carpets in 2007. There is,

however, an organization whose efforts ensure that some carpets are

made without slave and child labor. Rugmark is an international char-

ity that inspects and licenses carpet looms.25 When carpet makers apply

for a Rugmark license, they promise not to employ children less than

fourteen years of age in the production of carpets and to pay adult

weavers a minimum wage. In family carpet businesses, regular school

attendance is required for children employed as helpers, and only the

loom owner’s children are permitted to work. Carpet makers promise to

allow Rugmark’s inspectors to examine their looms and workers at any

time. The inspectors carry out random checks to see that the rules are

being followed. If they meet these requirements, a license permits the

carpet makers to put a Rugmark label, with a unique serial number, on

their carpets so that every carpet can be traced all the way back to the

loom where it was woven. Companies that import carpets to Europe