Third-party risks and supply chain management have featured high up on most organisations’ risk registers for some time, though mainly over worries that these suppliers may fail to deliver the required goods or services on time. Concerns over incidences of slavery and bonded/forced labour have never really been raised—until recently.
There have been some high-profile cases of companies employing forced labour in their supply chains. In November 2015, following an audit, food giant Nestlé admitted to cases of forced labour in its fishing operation in Thailand for the supply of its Purina brand Fancy Feast cat food. The company has also acknowledged purchasing coffee from two Brazilian plantations where authorities freed workers from conditions analogous to slavery in 2015, while rival coffee maker Jacobs Douwe Egberts admitted that it is possible that coffee from plantations in Brazil with poor labour conditions ended up in its products.
