Help Stop Modern Day Slavery

If you are worried about a specific person right now, the most useful thing you can do is ask for advice before you act. Australian Red Cross runs a confidential line on 1800 113 015 for anyone concerned that a friend, family member, colleague or acquaintance may be experiencing trafficking, slavery or slavery-like practices. If someone is in immediate danger, call 000.

“Modern day slavery” is the everyday phrase. Australian law uses modern slavery and names the specific practices underneath it, including forced labour, servitude, debt bondage, deceptive recruiting and forced marriage. The distinction matters when you go looking for help, because services and legislation are indexed under the legal terms.

Beyond that first call, an individual’s leverage is uneven and it is worth being honest about where it sits:

• As a consumer it is weak. No shopper can audit a supply chain from a supermarket aisle, and buying differently rarely reaches the people at risk.
• At work it is much stronger. If your job touches purchasing, payroll, rostering or site supervision, you see things a policy never will, and asking one question about who is actually doing the work is a real intervention.
• Raising a concern only works if the route exists beforehand. A person who does not know where to take it usually takes it nowhere.

Support is voluntary, and a person who is referred can leave at any time, which is worth knowing before you raise it with someone you are worried about. Nobody is asking you to diagnose anything. Noticing and asking is enough, and the people who assess it are trained to. Read more on human rights at work and on building a workplace culture where concerns get raised early. The Australian Red Cross Support for Trafficked People Program sets out how support works. This is general information rather than legal advice.

For organisations, Sentrient’s whistleblower course and modern slavery course give people that route before they need it.