What Is Modern Slavery Training

Modern slavery training teaches people to recognise severe exploitation in their workplace or supply chain and to know what to do next without making things worse for the person involved. It is awareness and response training. It is not legal training, and it does not stand in for due diligence.

The response half is where most programmes are thin. The Australian Government’s Practice Guidelines for Organisations, now in a fourth edition and produced with the National Roundtable on Human Trafficking and Slavery, give a whole section to preparing to engage before anyone approaches a person who may be affected. Well meant but untrained intervention can expose someone to retaliation, cost them accommodation tied to the job, or simply push the situation out of sight. Training that stops at a list of indicators leaves staff holding a problem with no safe way to act on it.

A course worth running covers:

• what modern slavery means in Australian law, in plain terms
• the difference between a job that is poor and a job a person is not free to leave
• deceptive recruitment, where the work turns out to be nothing like what was promised
• who to tell inside the organisation, and what that person is then expected to do

One practical point to plan for. That same government guidance opens with a content warning, because the material is confronting and some people in the room may have lived experience of it. Give staff a way to step out. Sessions of this kind sit alongside the rest of your compliance training and your wider human rights work rather than standing apart from them.

Reporting entities under the Modern Slavery Act 2018 commonly list training among the actions they have taken to assess and address risk. A completion percentage on its own says little about whether anyone could now recognise something and raise it. The Practice Guidelines are the better yardstick, and they are explicit that they are general guidance rather than legal or professional advice. The same caution applies here, and obligations change over time.

Sentrient’s modern slavery course sits within the wider compliance training courses library.