Making what’s good for workers, work for business.
Readymix Gulf: Promoting Worker Ownership of Health and Safety
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 [...]
The Inspiration: Why We at Impactt Work to Improve Labour Standards
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 [...]
Give me back my passport!
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 [...]
Gangmaster’s Licensing laws to be extended to the construction industry
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. [...]
The Cost of Living, in Britain and Beyond
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 [...]
Will the economic downturn put more children to work?
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 [...]