Despite overwhelming public and corporate support, the government has stalled progress on a modern day slavery law. That puts us behind other countries – and makes Christmas a time of tragedy rather than joy, argues Shanti Mathias.
Picture the scene on Christmas Day. Everyone replete with nice things to eat, the wrapping paper spilling out of the recycling bin, everyone’s new things dotted around the house. A purse for your niece – an electric robot toy for your friend’s five-year-old – oven mitts for your uncle who loves baking – a much-coveted assortment of coffee pods for your machine.
It might be hard, in this summery stupor of new stuff, to think about the people who made these objects. The weirdness of globalisation is that it’s difficult to picture the lives of people in Brazil or Indonesia or Vietnam who work in factories that produce goods that you buy as Christmas presents. Yet your connection to them isn’t abstract, it’s intimate. The seams of the oven mitts your uncle is now using to pull out a batch of his famous scones were touched, first, by a seamstress in Indonesia. The beans for your coffee were grown in the plantation behind someone’s village in Vietnam.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thousands of people drink water and irrigate their crops from lakes that have been polluted by the toxic byproducts of cobalt mining so the toy robot could have a battery. The cotton that lines your niece’s purse was carried in a big bundle to a truck by a woman who – coincidentally – is also known for always offering delicious brews of coffee to guests. You might never meet these people: but now that you have unwrapped your Christmas presents, you have touched the very same atoms, atoms that have been carried across the ocean to you.
The problem is that there is no way to know what condition these objects were produced under. Nearly $8 billion, around 10% of goods, that were imported into New Zealand last year have been linked to child and forced labour; electronics, coffee and clothing are particularly risky. The elongated nature of globalised supply chains produces opacity; consumer culture teaches us to see objects in their form on a shelf, with a price tag, not as a product of real resources and real human labour.
That means, unfortunately, that the robot that the kids are now fighting over in the corner could have been produced by a child who was working instead of going to school; the coffee might have been processed by forced labour. All of these working conditions fall under the definition of modern day slavery, an umbrella term that captures forced labour, debt bondage, child labour and domestic servitude that an estimated 50 million people experience around the world.
One way around this is to try to buy ethically. You could read Tearfund Ethical Fashion guides before making a clothing purchase. You can scroll to the bottom of a website and find a vaguely titled page about sustainability and try to figure out how much of it is greenwashing and how much is accredited standards that guarantee that you are not paying for exploitation of labour or environment. You can try to get around buying things, too.
This year, I’ve sewn several people gifts, and the crick in my back from bending over the sewing machine and my frustration with the corner seam that came out crooked has reminded me of the skill and physical toll that I have taken for granted when I’ve simply sauntered into a shop and exchanged money for a finished good. Yet despite that, I still don’t know what conditions the workers who grew the flax woven into my linen fabric experienced, or whether the people working on the container ship that moved that cloth from China to New Zealand were paying off unjustly structured debt, instead of being given a paycheck.
So another solution is to not make buying ethically a consumer choice at all, but instead a default; something companies must do to operate in New Zealand, checking every part of their supply chain. There’s nothing inherently bad about global trade – but distance makes it easier to accept that a good might come at the expense of someone else’s human rights. We could have a law that mandates that companies – maybe just the big ones at first, then everyone else – guarantee that no exploitation has happened at any point of their journey from raw material to under your Christmas tree. “People are enduring terrible conditions to make products we buy in New Zealand,” says Rebekah Armstrong, head of advocacy and justice at World Vision. “We need a law that ensures that businesses are respecting the human rights of the people who make them profitable.”
Versions of this law already exist in the UK, Australia and Canada, and a law has been proposed for New Zealand, too. I was at the announcement, in the Air New Zealand building in downtown Auckland. It was July 2023 and it had been a hard week for the Labour government, with minister Kiritapu Allan arrested while drunk driving and the party’s election chances looking shakier. Then deputy prime minister Carmel Sepuloni looked relieved to be announcing something unequivocally positive. Everyone in the room, including those from World Vision and Air New Zealand who have been advocating for this for years, was glad that finally, finally something was being announced.
The problem was what happened after, which was nothing. The legislation wasn’t put into place before the parliament session ended for the election. And while the National Party had previously expressed its support for modern day slavery legislation – “We would like something put down and delivered,” Paul Goldsmith told me in July 2023, while Chris Luxon told Guyon Espiner in 2022 that trafficking was an issue he would “march in the streets for” – nothing happened after it got elected, despite passing more bills under urgency in its first 100 days than any government before. Modern day slavery (mostly) isn’t happening to people in New Zealand, but surely it’s an urgent enough issue to bump up the legislative agenda? “When the government says this is not a priority, they’re saying that 50 million people are not a priority,” Armstrong says.
In April the government’s modern day slavery advisory group was quietly disestablished. Now Armstrong and others from the working group have tried to make the legislation even easier to adopt by drafting a modern day slavery bill. It would add reporting requirements for every company bringing in more than $50m in annual revenue to ensure there is no labour exploitation in their supply chain, add definitions of forced labour and trafficking into the Crimes Act to make trafficking and forced labour easier to prosecute here and enshrine protections for victims. While this doesn’t cover all companies – about 1,450 entities meet the definition – each would require its suppliers to meet the same standards, creating a flow-on effect. A members bill from National MP Greg Fleming to increase penalties for slavery offences in the Crimes Act passed its first reading on December 18, but Armstrong says it doesn’t go far enough. “Simply raising penalties, without broader reforms to address other inadequacies in modern slavery law leaves our legislative framework lacking if we want to prosecute these crimes effectively and protect survivor-victims adequately,” she said in a World Vision press release.
Under new standing orders, bills with support from 61 MPs can go directly to a first reading, rather than having to wait to be plucked out of the biscuit tin. Labour and its 34 MPs have already endorsed the more comprehensive draft bill; now it needs support from other parties.
A modern day slavery law wouldn’t solve the issues of inequality, violence, colonialism and poverty which mean that so many people, children included, work in abhorrent, unconscionable conditions for little or no pay. But it’s a start. So as you celebrate Christmas with the people you love, anticipating gifts being opened and good food being enjoyed, spare a thought for those who made the items under the Christmas tree. Imagine a world where it would be impossible to wrap up the exploitation of other people’s friends, uncles, nieces and children along with a present bought with love.