How To Combat Modern Slavery

The most useful thing an Australian business can do to combat modern slavery is make it reportable. Severe exploitation is rarely found by an announced audit. It surfaces when someone close to the work says something, and that only happens where a channel exists that they can reach and trust. Most organisations have such a channel and have quietly limited it to their own payroll.

Under Part 9.4AAA of the Corporations Act, an eligible whistleblower is broader than an employee. It covers a person who has supplied goods or services to the company, and the employees of those suppliers, paid or unpaid, including volunteers, and the protections extend to their relatives. The subject matter test reaches conduct breaching a Commonwealth offence punishable by 12 months imprisonment or more, which takes in the slavery and trafficking offences in the Criminal Code. Public companies and large proprietary companies must have a whistleblower policy.

Four things worth checking this week:

• Read your whistleblower policy and see whether contractors and supplier staff are named. If it says “employees” throughout, the people best placed to notice exploitation will not recognise themselves in it.
• Look at where the channel actually lives. A hotline sitting behind the staff intranet is invisible to a labour hire cleaner with no work email who may not read English.
• Train the people who receive reports, not only the workforce. The list of recipients who attract the protections is specific, and a disclosure made to the wrong person may fall outside it.
• Settle who investigates and how identity is held before a report arrives. Working that out afterwards is how confidentiality gets broken.

Confidentiality is not a courtesy here. Revealing a whistleblower’s identity outside the permitted circumstances is unlawful, and causing or threatening detriment carries both a criminal offence and a civil penalty, even where the person has not in fact made a disclosure. ASIC’s guidance on whistleblower rights and protections sets out who qualifies and how. Obligations differ by entity type and change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice.

A report is only useful if something happens next, so pair the channel with incident reporting that records it. Sentrient’s whistleblower course and modern slavery course sit within the wider compliance training courses library.