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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 [...]

We are pleased to hear that the Gangmaster Licensing laws will be extended to the construction industry as part of a government inquiry into the number of deaths in the construction industry.
Yvette Cooper the Work and Pensions Secretary will release a report: ‘One Death too Many’ which summarises the findings of the government inquiry. [...]

An exploratory study published last week by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation states that about one in four people in Britain are living below the minimum income standard and this is increasing as unemployment rises.  The Minimum Income Standard (MIS) for Britain is based on the public’s perception of what is deemed to be a [...]

As the financial crisis deepens, it raises serious questions regarding the people at the bottom of supply chains who have to cater to the growing global demand for cheaper products. How does the crisis affect them? And who exactly does it affect? Will children be hit the hardest?
A new report [...]

The BBC series Blood Sweat & Takeaways came to a close last week.  For the final episode the documentary picked the 6 young Brits up in the rice-farming regions of Thailand and followed them to the bustling capital of Bangkok.  This migration from the countryside is undertaken by many where the city holds potential [...]

Last night’s excellent Blood Sweat and Takeaways saw Brit youngsters working as labourers in the tiger prawn ponds in the jungles of Indonesia and peeling prawns in an export prawn factory.  This programme should be a compulsory feature of the national curriculum – skewering in an hour the yawning financial, social and attitudinal gap [...]

 
Network Clothing is one of the leading manufacturers of handmade crochet and knitwear garments. Since 1994, the company has supplied leading UK and international retailers. Network Clothing has a network of around 3,000 home workers within its supply chain, around 1,000 of whom are active at any given time. Most of the home workers [...]

Yesterday’s BBC3 documentary Blood, Sweat and Takeaways plonked six young Brits onto the production line of a tuna processing factory in Indonesia, with predictable consequences.  The Brits can’t cope with the living conditions, the heat, the factory environment, the tasks they are allocated – they vomit, they faint, they cry, they throw each other [...]

Labour standards have hit the headlines once again in the UAE, with a new report from Human Rights Watch on the conditions for workers on the flagship development Saadiyat Island, which is off the coast of the country’s capital Abu Dhabi.
Entitled ‘The Island of Happiness: Exploitation of migrant workers on Saadiyat [...]