Report highlights modern slavery risks in supply chain

In a report, Human Rights Outlook 2018, it warns that low-skilled workers in emerging economy supply chains “will find themselves jobless and competing for a diminishing supply of decent work, unless their countries start now to reskill and prepare workers to adapt to their gradual replacement by more efficient machines. Verisk Maplecroft highlights figures from the UN’s International Labour Organisation estimating that over the next two decades 56 percent of workers in the manufacturing hubs of Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam will lose their jobs due to automation. As a result, the risk of slavery and trafficking appearing in supply chains will spiral, says the report. “The dark side of automation could, therefore, mean fewer alternatives to exploitative work and a spiral into modern slavery that renders the SDG [sustainable develop goals] targets irrelevant.”