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In the early 1900s, Upton Sinclair zeroed in on the terrifying lack of standards in the meat industry. The progressive journalist related gruesome stories of gangrenous, diseased cattle arriving in the same package as those fit for consumption; those packages were shipped to unsuspecting consumers hundreds of miles away. The reports incited such public outrage and scrutiny that, in 1906, the United States passed the Pure Food and Drug Act to monitor production standards. Over a century later, while consumers can be more or less certain that their meat is produced in a sanitary fashion, the major point of Sinclair's work — that of deplorable worker conditions — remains an issue. Today, there's still little assurance that the people handling our food, often thousands of miles away, are being treated humanely. What exactly the gulf between food safety and human rights says about the average consumer's priorities is open to interpretation. Federal legislation, however, could be on the horizon. In the wake of an exposé published by The Guardian about slave labor in the Thai fishing industry, the UK introduced and passed the Modern Slavery Act within the space of a year. In early 2015, Nestlé, the world's largest consumer food product company, decided to investigate its supply chain by enlisting the services of Verité, a research and auditing firm based in Massachusetts. "We know that many products on American shelves were produced using trafficked or slave labor." Like the Guardian investigation, Verité found that many workers in the Asian fishing industry are victims of a deceptive cycle of trafficking, wage theft, debt bondage, and forced overtime. There's little recourse for the displaced workers who have been stripped of their identity. In many cases, Burmese and Laotian laborers reportedly paid trafficking fees to get to Thailand, an economy more robust than their neighboring homelands, only to be charged another job placement fee by a labor broker. This middleman would then transfer the worker's debt to a boat captain who would in turn garnish wages until the "job fee" is paid off. The report also cited malnourishment and the use of illicit substances to facilitate long working hours, creating an environment which regularly leads to altercations and in severe cases, death. Unfair labor conditions are not exclusive to the fishing industry. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 136 goods from 74 countries are produced with child labor or forced labor. This list, most recently updated last December, only includes public information, suggesting the problem is even more pervasive. "American consumers deserve to know how the products they purchase were made," says Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), writing via email last week. Maloney is the principal sponsor for the Business Supply Chain Transparency on Trafficking and Slavery Act, which she's brought up in two consecutive Congresses (it didn't make it out of the committee phase in the 2013-2014 Congress). "We know from investigative reporting and from our own government's analysis that many products on American shelves were produced using trafficked or slave labor." What does the legislation propose? Technically, it would amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the law which sought to make the stock market transparent following the crash of 1929. In 2015, the proposed supply chain bill requires corporations with global revenue exceeding $100 million to identify forced labor conditions occurring within their supply chains — and disclose efforts to eradicate them, if such efforts are underway. In the food and beverage world, this would impact businesses from Kroger to Keurig-Green Mountain. According to the law, these corporations would have to disclose this information in the same manner they deliver annual reports to the SEC. Additionally, their websites must provide readily accessible links to transparency reports. "My legislation will encourage large corporations to take an active role in their supply chains," says Rep. Maloney, "and report to the public what actions they are taking to stop these abuses." But while the bill seems like a silver bullet to solve systemic inequality, it raises a few immediate questions: How "active" will corporations be in the pursuit of transparency? To what degree of culpability will a corporation be held when forced labor is discovered in its supply chain? And what tools, if any, are available to a corporation looking to remedy these problems? Seafood supply chains, according to experts, are "inherently non-transparent." The seafood industry could provide the first legal precedent for reporting supply chain transparency. The California Transparency in Supply Chains Act, regarded as a precursor to Maloney's proposed legislation, went into effect in 2012. This August it prompted a class-action lawsuit filed against Costco. The plaintiff, a California resident, alleges the wholesaler's shrimp purveyor, C.P. Food Products, benefited from the same human rights violations outlined in both the Guardian exposé and the Nestlé-sponsored report. The complaint states the company falsely reported a supply chain free of forced labor when it had knowledge of the contrary. The case is still in the early stages, and it's uncertain if it will make it to trial. Even before the lawsuit, however, the initial reports from the Thai fishing industry spurred a multi-stakeholder coalition of retailers to investigate the claims of forced labor. Costco spearheaded the Shrimp Sustainable Supply Chain Taskforce, outlining objectives to eradicate unfair labor conditions. (In response to Eater's inquiry asking for a progress report on the initiative's goals, Costco cited a busy holiday season and deferred to its initial report.) Nestlé expressed plans to join the taskforce in their own Responsible Seafood Sourcing Plan [.pdf]. According to the Verité report, seafood supply chains are "often inherently non-transparent." Social and environmental accountability become obscured in the complex journey from ocean to freezer shelf, as numerous subcontractors participate in production. For instance, the Thai fishing vessels run by slave labor are often at sea for months at a time, using smaller boats to ferry in supplies and transfer the catch — leaving laborers out-of-view. The fish they are shipping is not meant for human consumption, but "trash fish" to be processed into feed for farm-raised shrimp. This effectively launders the deplorable labor conditions from a consumer-focused company only interested in selling low-cost frozen shrimp.
