THE MARITIME Union of Australia and the UN Global Compact Network Australia have launched a publication urging businesses to address modern slavery risks in their supply chains.
The MUA and corporate sustainability organisation UN Global Compact released Modern Slavery within Maritime Shipping Supply Chains on 9 December during a launch event at the KPMG office in Sydney.
The publication responds to an apparent lack of clarity around human rights impacts in the shipping industry.
It is intended as a tool to help businesses uphold their responsibilities to protect the rights of seafarers in their supply chains.
It outlines steps aimed at helping cargo owners integrate respect for seafarers’ rights into risk management and procurement processes.
Speaking on behalf of the MUA and International Transport Workers’ Federation, ITF inspectorate co-ordinator Ian Bray said the union facilitated engagement between the UN Global Compact Network Australia and seafarers on vessels in Australian waters.
He said highlighting issues such as crew underpayment helps businesses become more aware of what needs to be done to supress modern slavery.
“The more awareness around these things and the more that we do to try to eradicate it … the better off the seafarers will be in terms of making their working lives a little bit more tolerable in probably one of the most isolated jobs on the planet,” Mr Bray said.
Vanessa Zimmerman, director and chair of the business human rights workstream at the UN Global Compact Network Australia, said the publication would help build awareness around the “very extreme” issues seafarers are facing.
She explained modern slavery can occur when a business contributes to harm through something they have or have not done.
For example, an indirect charterer may mandate unreasonable conditions for the carriage of cargo, resulting in exploitation of the workers.
“Prevention is the best possible step you can take, so to have this awareness and to have the ability to build the awareness of Australian businesses in this area is really important,” she said.
MUA Policy Advisor Rod Pickette, a co-author of the publication, said there needs to be a goal for the social element of ESG, just as there is a goal for the environmental element.
“What’s the goal here? It’s the elimination of exploitation of workers,” he said.
“Each piece of work we’re doing here is a building block towards getting us to those same sorts of goals: elimination of exploitation and dealing with those sorts of risks in supply chains.”
And MUA national secretary Paddy Crumlin said the work is about identifying problems and translating them into better practices and protection for the “victims of institutional failures”.
He said it was not a matter of blame, but of sharing responsibility for addressing human rights issues in the maritime industry.
“This is everybody’s problem. It’s a commercial problem, it’s a political problem, it’s a human problem.”
