How To Solve Modern Slavery

No single business solves modern slavery. What a business can do is find the exploitation it is connected to and put it right, and the honest starting point is that most of the systems bought for that job do not find much. Audits are announced, workers are prepared for them, and the person who knows the most has the most to lose by speaking.

The Cleaning Accountability Framework, an Australian multi-stakeholder body that certifies cleaning supply chains, has published what its own certification work found. Around 70% of labour rights violations were uncovered through worker engagement alone, against 30% through desk-based audits. Bullying and harassment, discrimination and dangerous workloads had never been identified by desk-based audit alone. It also found that whistleblower mechanisms often went unused, and that workers who did use them frequently faced reprisal.

Read across to any sector and the practical answer looks less like more paperwork:

• Treat a programme that has never found anything as a blind one rather than a clean one.
• Give workers a reporting route that does not run through the employer benefiting from their silence.
• Use people who speak the worker’s language and understand the job. Trust builds over months, not in a scheduled interview.
• Measure the programme on issues found and resolved, not on training completion rates.
• Settle what remedy means before you need it. Wages repaid, documents returned, the person still in work.

That last point is where solving actually lands. Removing a supplier closes a file. Getting a worker their money back changes something for the worker. This sits inside broader human rights expectations on business, and it rests on the everyday workplace culture question of whether people believe speaking up is safe. CAF’s findings on worker engagement are worth reading in full. Obligations differ by sector and change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice.

Sentrient’s modern slavery course and the wider compliance training courses build the awareness that makes reporting more likely.