NGO welcomes Nestl action against Thai forced labor

(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly) An independent NGO which investigated the shrimp supply chain in Thailand welcomed “as tremendously important” Wednesday an action plan launched by Nestlé to prevent labor and human rights abuses.

Dan Viederman CEO of Verite a United States-based non-profit organization hired by the company to investigate its business practices told Anadolu Agency “it is tremendously important that Nestlé has been open in public about the problems that we found and were also reported before in some media.”

“Nestlé has not shied away from the findings and by publicizing them they have committed themselves” he added.

Verite published a report this month entitled “Recruitment practices and migrant labor conditions in Nestlé’s Thai shrimp supply chain” which found “indicators of forced labour trafficking and child labor” among workers on fishing boats in ports and in shrimp farms on Thai soil.

Reacting to the findings Nestlé launched a ten-point action plan Tuesday which aimed to establish a traceability system across the seafood supply chain establish partnerships with local NGOs to “protect workers from the worst form of labour conditions” and set up a program to train fishing boat captains in best practices.

“Nestlé is committed to eliminating forced labor in our seafood supply chain in Thailand” Magdi Batato executive vice-president of operations for the multinational said in a statement.

Most of the workers on Thai fishing boats are migrant workers from Myanmar Laos or Cambodia.

They come into Thailand through brokers and are sometimes “sold” to captains of Thai boats where they work long hours in hazardous conditions.

A recurring problem is that their wages are retained by the boat captains until the brokers’ fees are repaid.

Verite’s report stated that among its key findings were “excessive fees (charged by the broker) leading to debt bondage in some cases” as well as “severe” working conditions “including excessive overtime” and underage workers on fishing boats.

It also said that the boat captains often withhold migrant workers’ passports or ID cards in order to prevent them from leaving before the end of the contract and mentioned “isolation and restriction of movements” as “indicators of forced labour” for the shrimp farm workers.

The small fish or “trash fish” caught by the boats -- sometimes in the Gulf of Thailand but also in international waters or in Indonesian or Malaysian waters -- are used to produce feed for the shrimp farms thus establishing a link between the working conditions on boats and the shrimp exported by Thailand to the international market.

“The most important message of our findings is that the risks of forced labor and severe exploitation are widespread and systemic” Viederman told Anadolu Agency.

“It is important that the workers are acting in their own interests as much as they can. But most of their time their ability to act is severely constrained by their conditions of work” he added.

Nestlé commissioned Verite to carry out the investigation after pet food buyers in the U.S. filed a class action lawsuit claiming they would not have bought its products if they had known they were linked to slave labour in Thailand.

Thailand is the world’s largest shrimp exporter.

By Max Constant