Prevent Modern Slavery

Most modern slavery is found because a person says something, not because an audit uncovers it. Audits are usually announced, workers are often coached before them, and the people best placed to notice sit outside the compliance team. Prevention therefore rests on a practical question. If someone wanted to raise a concern about your operations or your suppliers, could they, and would it be safe?

Australian law already reaches further here than most organisations assume. Under Part 9.4AAA of the Corporations Act 2001, an eligible whistleblower is not only a current or former employee or officer. It also covers a person, or an employee of a person or entity, who has supplied goods or services to the company, paid or unpaid, and it extends to volunteers and to the relatives of those people. A worker employed by one of your suppliers can be a protected whistleblower about your business.

The protections are meaningful. A disclosure can be made anonymously. Revealing a whistleblower’s identity outside limited circumstances is unlawful. Causing or threatening detriment, which includes dismissal, altering someone’s duties to their disadvantage, intimidation, psychological harm and damage to their reputation, carries both a criminal offence and a civil penalty, and applies even where the person has not actually made a report.

What that means in practice:

• Name a person authorised to receive disclosures, and make sure a contractor could find that name without asking their supervisor
• Offer a route that does not run through the line manager, since the manager is often the one benefiting from the arrangement
• Provide it in the languages your workforce and your onsite contractors actually speak
• Decide in advance how a report is investigated while keeping the person’s identity protected, because the two pull against each other

Be honest about the limits. These protections reach the suppliers you contract with, not the tiers below them, so a channel is one control rather than the answer. Personal work-related grievances usually fall outside the regime as well. The ASIC guidance on whistleblower rights and protections sets out who qualifies and when. Public companies, large proprietary companies and corporate trustees of registrable superannuation entities must also have a whistleblower policy. This is general information rather than legal advice, and obligations change, so check what applies to your entity.

A speak-up route only works if people know it exists, which is where whistleblower training, clear policy management and the wider workplace culture do the work. Sentrient’s modern slavery course covers the awareness side.