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Last year, Impactt was commissioned by the Asian Development Bank to co-ordinate a study into the impact of the global economic slowdown on value chain labour markets in Asia. Impactt worked with partners in ADB, ILO, and GTZ as well as local research partners in People’s Republic of China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam to [...]

Human Rights Watch released in Dubai last week its annual World Human Rights Report 2010, which along with 3 other countries, includes a chapter on the state of human rights in the United Arab Emirates.
The chapter covers a range of human rights issues, including press freedom, human trafficking, the rights of detained persons and [...]

Impactt was in Bangladesh two weeks ago – we went to visit a few factories, including one where we’ve been involved since 2006 on behalf of New Look. We are so pleased with the results that we wanted to share them with you.
When New Look and Impactt started working with Echo, one of New [...]

Impactt was in Brussels last week to attend the GTZ conference on “China, Germany and Europe: Joint Solutions for CSR in the Global Value Chains”.
The conference was split into two main sessions. During the first one, key speakers from the WTO China and the Chinese ministry of human resources and social security gave their [...]

Impactt has recently come across a case of bonded labour in a factory in Eastern Europe.  Migrant workers were brought from Asia and had to pay huge amounts of money to travel to and work in Europe. Behind the deposits and the debt, lie the stories of many migrant workers who leave their country [...]

Keen to raise his workers health and safety risk awareness and provide them with the tools to manage and reduce risk on a daily basis, manager Wayne Terry engaged Impactt to deliver training to his workers at Readymix Gulf as a part of the company’s Safety Month.
As site manager of the Sharjah and Ajman [...]

Improving labour standards can be a challenging road – the pace of change is frustrating and the magnitude of the problems sometimes overwhelming. However, there are winning situations that remind us why we do what we do.
Successful child labour remediation is one of those and we would like to share with you the story [...]

Last night Newsnight broadcast an investigation into the exploitation of immigrant labour in London hotels.  Newsnight found that workers were being paid according to the number of rooms cleaned not hours worked.  This meant that workers were regularly being paid below the £5.73 per hour minimum adult wage.  Example payslips which the BBC uncovered [...]

Reports of employers holding migrant workers’ passports are commonplace in Gulf countries. Retailers and brands, as well as human rights activists (eg Human Rights Watch) consider this to be bonded labour, but the practice is widespread in construction and manufacturing sectors.
Employers come up with a range of excuses for retaining passports. We’ve heard ‘just [...]

Over the past few months, as the building next door and the mercury levels inch slowly higher, Impactt’s Middle East North Africa office in Dubai has been taking shape.
The operating environment here is both an unusual and changing one. Dubai’s dramatic experience of the global recession has been widely reported and there is no [...]