Interdisciplinary Team Collaborates to Fight Modern Slavery

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The next time you buy a shirt that says “Made in Bangladesh” or “Made in India” on the label, try to imagine the standard of living for the people who made it. Bangladesh and India are relatively low-income countries, of course, but costs are also much lower there; perhaps the two factors balance each other out?

Maybe they do for some people, but for others — especially those who work in the apparel industry — life can be much grimmer.

According to the findings of an interdisciplinary team from the Poole College of Management, the Wilson College of Textiles and the Operations Research Graduate Program, hundreds of thousands of apparel workers in Bangladesh and India are living and working in conditions that can only be called modern slavery. Fortunately, the team provided extensive reports on its research — including information about the causes of slavery and detailed recommendations for how to address the problem — to a global organization working to eradicate slavery in all its forms.

Less Than a Dime
The team’s work originated in the research of Rejaul Hasan, a Ph.D. student in Textiles whose interdisciplinary dissertation committee was co-led by Poole College faculty member Rob Handfield, the Bank of America University Distinguished Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management.

“Rejaul was doing research to determine exactly how much the price of clothing from Bangladesh would increase if it were produced in factories that ensured workers a living wage and a safe, livable work space — places with air conditioning, working bathrooms, things like that,” Handfield says. “Rejaul is from Bangladesh and used to work as an apparel factory auditor there, so this issue is very close to his heart.”

Hasan’s dissertation research determined that in order to cover the cost of improving working conditions and salaries, a factory would have to increase the cost of a single cotton t-shirt by less than 10 cents. Getting factories to make those changes — and getting wholesale purchasers to accept them — is another matter, but it seems certain that nearly all Western consumers would willingly pay the extra dime, particularly if they knew what it was for.

Then Handfield attended a conference where he met the CEO of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, a nonprofit organization working to end modern slavery (also known as “forced labor”) by making the practice unprofitable. The International Labor Organization defines forced labor as any work that is performed involuntarily and under threat of penalty. Forced labor takes place in a number of economic sectors around the world — such as construction, domestic service and sex trafficking — but GFEMS is particularly interested in fighting slavery in the apparel sector because Western brands source their merchandise from those factories, which might give antislavery activists the kind of leverage they need to make a real impact.

GFEMS invited Handfield to assemble a team and respond to the organization’s request for proposal to fund research that would seek to identify where forced labor might be taking place in the apparel sector in India and Bangladesh. The proposed research would also identify factors driving the problem and would make recommendations for how to address it.

Handfield put together a research team that included himself, Hasan and the co-chair of Hasan’s dissertation committee, Marguerite Moore, a professor in the Wilson College of Textiles, along with other graduate students in the colleges of Textiles and Management. Also on the team were graduate students in NC State’s Operations Research Graduate Program, an interdisciplinary program jointly administered by the colleges of Engineering and Sciences.

This 11-member research team documented the prevalance and drivers of modern slavery in the apparel sector in India and Bangladesh.
This interdisciplinary research team documented the prevalence and drivers of modern slavery in the apparel sector in India and Bangladesh, and they made recommendations for how to address the problem. Standing, left to right: Hang Sun (Ph.D. student, Operations Research), Pinelopi Kouloglu (MBA student, Poole College of Management), Aayush Khandelwal (MBA student, Poole College of Management), Sultana Islam (MBA student, Poole College of Management), Rejaul Hasan (Ph.D. student, Wilson College of Textiles), Balaji Soundararajan (Ph.D. student, Operations Research).
Seated, left to right: Sahir Patel (MBA student, Poole College of Management), John Zapko (faculty advisor, Supply Chain Resource Cooperative), Marguerite Moore (professor, Wilson College of Textiles), Robert Handfield (professor, Poole College of Management), Alex Trauftims (professor, University of Nottingham).
The team worked under a very tight timeline to develop and submit a proposal that successfully won funding, and before they knew it team members were on the ground in India and Bangladesh to document working conditions in factories and spinning mills. Other researchers did secondary research and statistical analysis to estimate the prevalence of forced labor in various sectors of the apparel industry and in the two countries being studied.

‘Like Peeling an Onion’
The team found a complicated set of factors driving the market for modern slavery in Bangladesh and India. Despite both countries’ booming economies and governmental efforts to root out forced labor, deep-rooted cultural factors and entrenched business practices contributed to the problem.

“People tend to throw India and Bangladesh in the same pot, but they’re very different in their governments and their cultures,” Handfield says. “Both do have a lot of government corruption and extreme poverty, but there are still these massive differences. So we had to wrap our heads around very diverse cultures and economies.”

The team found that many of the people subjected to modern slavery in both countries worked for businesses in the informal manufacturing sector, a collection of quasi-legal enterprises that supply the domestic market and operate with little oversight. In contrast, the formal manufacturing sector — consisting of companies primarily engaged in the manufacture and export of garments for Western markets — was mostly free of modern slavery. However, the team also found that companies in the formal sector that sold to domestic or non-Western markets were more likely to employ some form of forced labor.

“It was like peeling an onion,” Handfield says. “The more we got into it, the more we found that we didn’t know before.”

NC State is the kind of place where you can bring people from different parts of the university together to work on a problem.

In Bangladesh, the team found that the so-called tier 1 companies, which export to the West, were superficially “clean” with regard to forced labor; but they also uncovered a vibrant, unregulated subcontracting tier that was difficult to assess. Working conditions for unregulated subcontractors ranged from not bad to very poor. Overall, the team estimated that 180,000 to 240,000 apparel workers were subjected to different forms of forced labor in Bangladesh, at least 90 percent of whom were poor migrants.

“The Bangladeshi government turns a blind eye because they don’t want to admit there’s a problem,” Handfield says. “They see the apparel sector as the best way to combat poverty, and they don’t want to drive away commerce.”

In India, the team found a complicated cyclical migration of workers providing constant labor for a number of industries, including the apparel sector. The researchers also discovered a vigorous home-based manufacturing sector — in which people worked in their homes, often employing children — that acted as an “under the table” contributor to the apparel industry’s formal sector. The team estimated that there were 500,000 to 800,000 people working in forced labor in India’s apparel sector, mainly poor migrants.

Hope for Solutions
The researchers’ recommendations for remedying the problem of modern slavery in India and Bangladesh include teaching Western brands to identify suppliers likely to be using forced labor, educating workers about their rights and finding trusted local partners to help accomplish these objectives.

“This research was depressing and eye-opening,” Moore says. “It’s not something you think about when you buy a t-shirt from Target. Why is it so cheap? Because that eight-dollar t-shirt is not actually an eight-dollar t-shirt. Someone, somewhere, absorbed the true price of producing it.”

Both Moore and Handfield say this research would have been far less effective if everyone involved had approached it separately from within their own disciplinary boundaries.

“NC State is the kind of place where you can bring people from different parts of the university together to work on a problem,” Handfield says. “Other universities are a lot less like that. Bringing engineering and analytics and textiles and business together to work on this research made it really rich.”

Moore agrees. “Having people from different disciplines and backgrounds and parts of the world working on the same problem leads to a better solution,” she says.
Source: https://news.ncsu.edu

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