February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month
February 1, 2016
Katherine ChonBy Katherine Chon, Director, Office on Trafficking in Persons
The other night, I joined a friend at a local restaurant interested in ordering seafood for dinner. “Do you know if this shrimp is sourced from Thailand?” she asked the waiter. Her question came after a series of investigative news articles shined a spotlight on slavery and forced labor experienced by thousands of fisherman in the Thai shrimp industry. The restaurant had enough information to know that the shrimp were from British Columbia.
But how do consumers who want to make ethical shopping choices – and the businesses who want to make those choices available – navigate the products we consume every day when supply chains are more complicated? Raw goods like shrimp may be easier to trace than the source of cotton in our clothing, sugar in our food, metal in our electronics, or the services in construction and hotels.
Our colleagues at the U.S. Department of Labor issue regular reports on products made from forced labor or indentured child labor around the world, but are there ways we can better use technology to help consumers and businesses be more aware and responsible - while also empowering workers to have access to more information about their working conditions to make meaningful choices?
Those were some of the questions that drove the Partnership for Freedom to put out a challenge in our second innovation competition launched in October 2015, seeking technological solutions to help identify and address labor trafficking in global supply chains. Earlier this week, we joined the Partnership for Freedom in announcing five finalists in the Rethink Supply Chains: The Tech Challenge to Fight Labor Trafficking.
The Partnership for Freedom is a public-private partnership led by Humanity United
, in collaboration with the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of State, the Department of Labor, Steven Spielberg's Righteous Persons Foundation, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Initiative, and the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Family Fund.
We congratulate the finalists who were selected by a panel of judges with expertise across corporate supply chains, human rights, philanthropy, and investing. Each finalist will receive $20,000 and proceed to the Finalist Accelerator round of the competition, to further develop their proposed solutions with support from subject matter experts. One Grand Prize Winner and one Runner-Up will be announced in April 2016, and will be awarded $250,000 and $50,000, respectively.
We look forward to seeing how the following finalists will refine their solutions to break through the fog of information that is currently challenging government, businesses, consumers, and workers to connect with a marketplace of slave-free goods and services:
- Good World Solutions: Laborlink Trafficking Module: Capturing & Mapping Millions of Data Points to Eliminate Forced Labor Analyzes and maps forced labor using a mobile communication channel between workers and supply chain leaders to report on working conditions.
- IST Research: PULSE Deployable Labor Trafficking System Data analytics system that scrapes web data to monitor social media and public internet sources for indicators of labor exploitation.
- Mobile Accord, Inc.: Identifying Human Rights Issues In the Fishing Industry Through Mobile Surveys Mobile survey platform that collects and shares labor condition data from workers via SMS, Interactive Voice Response, and mobile web.
- Sustainability Incubator and Trace Register: Building Trust in Fishing at Sea Traceability software that enables seafood suppliers to voluntarily report on the origins of their catches and vessel working conditions.
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Ulula: SPARTACUS: A Global Mobile Platform for Empowering Migrant Workers to End Slavery Mobile payment and feedback service for migrant workers to increase transparency and accountability in the recruitment process.
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