A horrific and astonishing article in the Sunday Times magazine by Steve Boggan a couple of weeks ago told the story of illegal immigrants from the Czech Republic who were forced into working as ‘modern slaves’ by a gang of unscrupulous traffickers, largely from the same country.
“How a McDonald’s and a bread factory ended up employing slaves” was the title of the article. ‘Between 2012 and 2019, a gang trafficked at least 16 people from the Czech Republic and put them into forced labour in the UK. They called their victims ‘horses’, took away their passports and beat them. How did they get away with it for years?’
The victims worked in a pitta bread factory in north London, in car washes or even as prostitutes. Several worked in a McDonalds at Caxton, near Cambridge. Like many McDonalds outlets, this was a franchised site, and it is hard to read the article without thinking that the owners of the site (and other businesses where victims worked) who denied all knowledge of the slavery were at best culpable of a lack of interest and care, or perhaps much worse
Firms happily employed the victims, despite warning signs such as salaries being paid into various different bank accounts – not in the name of the worker, of course. ‘Non-slave’ colleagues didn’t raise the alarm either. The victims were worried that if they went to the police, they would be imprisoned themselves, or sent back to their homeland. They were also terrified of what action the gang might take against them or even their families back home.
This went on for years, a decade at least, with the slaves living in terrible conditions, threatened, beaten up, their wages expropriated by their masters and more. One seventeen year old girl had twice run away back to her mother – who promptly sold her back to the same gang!
The gang were finally caught and sentenced to last year, the leader getting 13 years in jail. McDonalds said it cared deeply about the welfare of all staff, but did not answer many of the journalist’s questions and the slaves themselves said they have not received an apology or been contacted by McDonalds or the franchises. . McDonalds continued to award new franchises to the owner of one of the outlets after the slavery was discovered as well.
It is shocking and shows that anyone who thinks, ‘oh, it’s not happening in my town / firms I use / my business’ is probably being naive. There is anti-slavery legislation in many countries now, including the 2015 Modern Slavery Act in the UK, but it is debatable whether it has really made much of a difference. And for all procurement and sustainability people, the message is clear. Modern slavery exists in all sorts of places, not just the car washes, nail bars and fruit farms where we might expect to find it. So it Is not enough to simply write a nice anti-slavery policy and email it to all your suppliers. You need to be proactive, and take positive action, and we all should be vigilant. This was the last paragraph of the article, quoting one of the victims.
‘The family who did this to us is big, and we’re afraid of bumping into them one day’ he said. ‘I think I’ll always be afraid of that. So I’m free, but I’m not sure I’ll ever have peace of mind’.