Modern Slavery and Labour Exploitation in UK Hotel Chains
The Wilberforce Business Academy has been set up to provide businesses and third-sector organisations with practical training on applying due diligence and best practices in the recruitment and management of workers across global supply chains.
UK's tourism and hospitality industries have high worker concentration, posing a challenge in managing risks of labour exploitation and modern slavery. Dr Zahra Shirgholami discusses these risks, including gaps in enforcement, normalisation and moralisation of exploitation, and potential threats from macro-level issues. She also highlights how these risks, with competitive labour markets, paradoxically could present new opportunities.
Our online training programme has been designed to help organisations meet the requirements of the Modern Slavery Act and EU Due Diligence laws. and examine issues of slavery and exploitation from a business perspective. Provided free of charge, these bite size one-hour training sessions build on the expertise of labour and human rights practitioners who have direct experience of conducting risk assessments and working alongside businesses, NGOs and trade unions to improve the living and working conditions of workers worldwide.
Our programme lead is the Wilberforce Institute's Cristina Talens, who is a social auditor and one of the foremost practitioners in this field. Cristina’s international experience in labour, human rights and ethical trading stretches over 25 years and includes:
- working on labour exploitation of migrant workers in agriculture across the EU, Central & Latin America and Africa;
- developing re-integration programmes for victims of modern slavery
- across the EU;
- acting as a consultant researcher on the UN Global Programme Against Trafficking and Smuggling of Human Beings;
- conducting regular social audit and research assignments on behalf of major UK supermarkets and food companies; and
- delivering labour, human rights and ethical training programmes for companies' technical, HR and procurement teams.
More information about the Wilberforce Business Academy can be found here.