How To Fight Modern Slavery

Fighting modern slavery in practice means changing who verifies that conditions are acceptable. Most supply chain programmes lean on documents the supplier hands over, and paperwork is the easiest part of an exploitative arrangement to keep tidy. The verification that holds up comes from the people doing the work, on terms that make speaking safe for them.

The Cleaning Accountability Framework, an Australian scheme run jointly by property owners, contractors, unions and industry bodies, publishes case studies from its own building assessments that show why. In one, a contractor answers concerns by producing valid work visas, payslips and bank transfer records for every cleaner on site. It all checked out. A supervisor had taken the cleaners’ passports and was clawing back most of their wages in cash. The documents were accurate and told the buyer nothing.

Four things follow from that:

• Treat supplier documents as a starting point rather than assurance. They show what a compliant arrangement would look like, not what happened on the floor.
• Build a route for people who work on your sites without being on your payroll to raise something, and keep it independent of their supervisor.
• Pay for the time. CAF has cleaners watch its briefing and complete its survey during paid shifts, and appoints a site representative who receives an allowance for the role. Consultation squeezed into unpaid time returns silence.
• Settle the remediation path before you find anything, including how anonymity is protected, so nobody is improvising while a worker is exposed.

Where a credible scheme already covers your category, joining it beats building your own. CAF assesses labour, responsible contracting, work health and safety, financial viability, worker engagement and remediation, then re-checks certified sites through annual health checks rather than one point-in-time audit. The model is set out on the CAF certification page. Treat this as general information rather than legal advice, since obligations differ by sector and change over time.

A workplace culture where raising a concern is ordinary makes all of it easier, and the duty itself sits inside a wider human rights responsibility that reaches past your own payroll. Sentrient’s modern slavery course and the broader compliance training courses cover the awareness side.