Modern slavery persists in tech supply chains, report finds

The tech industry is a substantial contributor to the estimated $468 billion worth of imported goods that are at risk of being produced by forced labor, a new report found.

International human rights group Walk Free’s fifth Global Slavery Index, released in May, revealed that there were 49.6 million people globally in “modern slavery on any given day in 2021,” which the group defines as “situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, or abuses of power.” That definition includes forms of forced labor, human trafficking, and child labor.

Electronics from China and Malaysia account for the highest-value at-risk imports in G20 countries, totaling $243.6 billion. Of those, the majority come from Malaysia—where the industry relies on laborers from Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, and Indonesia, and where cases of forced labor and debt bondage have been reported in the electronics industry—and China, where electronics factories reportedly rely on state-forced laborers belonging to the Uyghur ethnic group.

Elsewhere in the tech industry, solar panels are the No. 4 at-risk product in terms of value, with $14.8 billion in imports to the G20 economic bloc, which includes 19 countries plus the European Union.

According to the report, nearly two-thirds of forced labor globally is linked to supply chains, with the majority of cases occurring in raw materials extraction and production.

Felix Papier, an operations and supply chain management professor at ESSEC Business School in Paris and currently a visiting scholar at the University of California Los Angeles, said reducing exposure to forced labor in a supply chain requires transparency, which is particularly challenging in the tech industry.

“Tech supply chains tend to be complex supply chains, such as electronics,” Papier told Tech Brew, pointing to raw materials like cobalt. “If you look at a particular ounce of gold…they’ve changed [ownership] sometimes 50 to 100 times before they come into the manufacturing plant of an electronics company,” he explained.

The electronics industry is one of the largest users of raw minerals commonly associated with forced labor in their extraction, but the issue reaches all the way to the other end of the supply chain, with child labor being a problem in electronics disposal and recycling, Papier said.

The tech industry could soon be under additional pressure to eradicate forced labor, he added, both from consumers and from government regulation. Papier pointed to initiatives like the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which requires companies importing goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region to prove those goods weren’t produced using forced labor.

But the tech industry itself should also play a role, including by creating tech-based solutions like those focused on by industry group Tech Against Trafficking, Papier said.

“Those solutions can really make a big difference,” he added.