See how many slaves work for you

It sucked me in. We started off years ago. I would say probably the genesis for us was me getting a call from the State Department in about The original campaign goal was , people taking the survey in the first year. The actual result was 1,, surveys in the first month, and then 2,, by the end of the second month.

The site is really good at taking you down a journey, and along the way, showing you where the things you buy are at risk of being sourced from slave labor.

And as you answer these questions, it helps you start to notice the risk factors of the items you purchase, and it actually starts to put a face to the forced laborers that produce those products.

There are fewer children in the entire New York City public school system. I do an adapted capsule closet thing. The power of this number was even weightier when we considered the data sets used by the algorithm. And to take it a step further, to confirm the data, they brought in people from the government, academia, NGOs, leading think tanks, and independent experts.

And for their basic assumptions, they relied on focus groups. Like through the entire thing give facts and give data in the easiest way possible. The way that we did that really is just a blend of science and art, and so we picked different of the most popular consumer products, and then we did product breakdowns. Now that term is known as our product genome project.

So what goes into a blender? What goes into a bed sheet? What goes into a bicycle? And we could figure out all these different pieces from primary extractives all the way up to manufacturing of where the inputs are in these different consumer products. And so, as we constructed these product genomes cross different consumer products for Slavery Footprint, it turned out to be quite a bit of data.

So people always knew how many footprints were being taken. So what that does is it kind of forces a public conversation around it, and that conversation continued to grow and grow, and the media kept picking up on it,. And so, part of that tension, I believe, is what, led at least we certainly know this is the case with the Obama administration, is the passing of some executive orders that he created around federal contractors.

Usually how this works is companies work with a tier one supplier. So we apply analytics based off of salients in proximity of risk to the company, risk versus spend, and we allow the company to adjust all of those parameters that best fits their planning for oversight over whatever amount of time they want to execute against that. And the hope is that as companies start to make more and more purchase deals with suppliers that are ethical, the market pressure will start to force other contractors to bring up their standards as well.

One of those was a company called Ariba. Ariba is kind of like an eBay for procurement. That would be really interesting. Yes, we have a world-domination appetite. And big data is only going to get better. We asked Justin what he sees as the next step in this space, and this is what he had to say. There are drones following ships in Indonesia and elsewhere.

But Justin still has hope. And small, small degrees of change, like using software to procure the goods for your business is probably very small degrees of change in the moral arc of the universe, but those degrees start to add up.

The problem is really complicated, but one of the best things you can do is become more informed. The challenge has been to hit people with more hard facts and sustain their attention. We started by picking products, not specific brands that are popularly used, such as bikes, laptops, diapers, coffee, cotton T-shirts, cosmetics and then investigated levels of forced labor used both to source raw materials and to manufacture the items.

By taking these actions, users receive Free World Points, which Dillon likens to carbon offsets. Want to see more fun stuff? Sign up. This website uses cookies to improve service and provide tailored ads. By using this site, you agree to this use.

See our Cookie Policy. Division Digital. Robert Bader. Emmanuel Saccoccini. It is estimated that over 40 million people are affected by slavery and another 85 million children under the age of 11 work in hazardous labor conditions.

Those who participate in the survey are given a number of people in slavery required in order to maintain their current lifestyle. The purpose of the tool is to raise awareness. The app gained a lot of traction, partially thanks to news outlets and coverage by the likes of CNN and the Washington Post. In , during the th anniversary of Emancipation Proclamation, President Obama acknowledged Mr. We believe in using the free market to free people.

At its core, the Slavery Footprint website allows consumers to visualize how their consumption habits are connected to modern-day slavery. Lake Volta is associated with child labor trafficking as children, some aged five, work as many as 17 hours a day catching fish in the lake. Children have to dive deep to unhook heavy and tangled webs. Some of them never return to the surface.

Others are exploited, kept alive with minimal food and often torturous treatment. Charities including Challenging Heights are involved in rescuing children from the lake, providing transportation, the basics such as clothing, food, first aid, shelter and education with the aim of returning children to their families.

You can read the short stories of rescued children, as they return to their childhood and are on their way to fulfilling their dreams of becoming future teachers, lawyers, drivers or doctors. This is just one example of the global linkages made by modern slavery, which span the globe.

Understanding a comprehensive picture of our connections to people living in modern slavery is very difficult indeed as supply chains are fragmented, rarely visible to consumers and we do not have accurate information on the true numbers of those experiencing modern slavery. The Slavery Footprint gives users an idea of potential connections and is helpful in indicating the breadth and scale of those connections around the world.

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