Thank you very much. It's nice to be with a group of people who use “iffy” as a word.

Hello and bonjour. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and other dignitaries there. I'd like to thank the committee for allowing me to appear today. It's an honour to discuss the critical issue of child labour in global supply chains.

The Freedom Fund is an international organization. It was founded in 2014 by three of the largest private sector donors in the anti-slavery space. Our mission is to mobilize the knowledge capital and the will to end slavery. Our work takes several forms, but perhaps most crucial is our strategy of working on the front line where slavery is most prevalent. We do this by partnering, often with small front-line NGOs. We currently work with 100 partners, including 80 grassroots NGOs in countries like Ethiopia, India, Nepal, and Thailand. We also partner with visionary investors, businesses, and governments to tackle the systems that allow slavery to thrive and persist.

Like others who have reported to this forum, we're seeing a global movement—as I'm sure many in the room already understand—toward supply chain reform legislation, with Dutch child labour laws, the U.K.'s Modern Slavery Act of 2015, and the very recently announced proposed Australian legislation setting new standards for corporate accountability.

Canada has historically played a global leadership role in promoting human rights. However, on this issue it risks falling behind the global pace. The current study presents an excellent opportunity for Canada to consider its leadership by addressing human rights in global supply chains and a stepping stone toward the creation of the world's strongest legislation.

Child labour is present in most of the areas of our work, from exploitation in the Kathmandu adult entertainment industry, where children are effectively in forms of brothels, to Ethiopian girls migrating to Saudi Arabia for domestic work, but today I'd like to focus on the case of child labour in the textile industry and then speak briefly of the roles of civil society, corporates, and governments in eliminating child labour in this industry and others.

I'm in Mexico, which is an unusual place for an Australian who lives in New York to be presenting to a Canadian forum. I'm in transit back from a visit to South Asia, and I spent all of last week looking at aspects of cotton milling and child labour within it. I'm sure many of you have seen media reports and other research around that. It's fairly well documented that there's severe exploitation, forced and bonded labour, and child labour in global textile supply chains in countries like Myanmar and Bangladesh.

These abuses can be directly linked to the garments and home textiles imported and sold in countries like the United States, Europe, and of course Canada. Children work at all stages of the textile supply chain, from cotton seed production and cotton growing to spinning yarn in mills to sewing, weaving, embroidering, and finishing in factories and home workshops.

In the garment industry, child forced and bonded labour persists for many reasons. One is that we have increasingly complex supply chains. In addition, there's an increase in the proliferation of subcontracting, there's a shortage of adult workers in many places, and there's a demand for fast fashion—cheap fashion—from western consumers that is continually putting downward pressure on prices, which increases exploitation at the very bottom end of supply chains.

There's also a lack of laws around child forced and bonded labour. Even when there are laws, there's a lack of enforcement of some of those laws. I'm sure my colleagues at IJM will speak more around the important role of justice.

We also see a failure of mapping, monitoring, and training efforts of western retailers to reach beyond the first tiers of the supply chain, and in many cases for those same actors to realize they have a responsibility for what happens at the very early stages of the supply chain in the garments they produce.

What I saw last week was predominantly in cotton milling. They take the raw cotton, much like cotton bolls, and mill it down to threads. Then that goes on to form clothes that many of us would be wearing today. Cotton spinning is just one point in a long supply chain. The yarn produced in these mills is used in garments and other products imported and sold by major U.S., Canadian, and European retailers.

It is clear that businesses and companies that are selling these clothes can also play a role in protecting the young people who are exploited at the bottom end of the supply chain. This past week, we saw a lot of child labour. It was unhidden and extensive. We saw some very effective programming also, though, with positive interventions to stop severe forms of exploitation, which are ensuring young girls and their families can make better and informed decisions about if and where their children work.

A study commissioned by the Freedom Fund and the C&A Foundation in 2014 estimated that there are 100,000 women and girls in Tamil Nadu in India who are caught in spinning mills in conditions amounting to bonded labour, but more recent studies suggest that is a very conservative estimate and that it is into the hundreds of thousands.

Child labour in Tamil Nadu is generally in decline; however, work carried out by adolescents is still prevalent in mills, for the reasons discussed previously, and a large proportion of female mill workers are under 18. In the mills that are run using workers living in the mill hostels, many girls enter into employment through fraudulent recruitment processes.

Labour brokers recruit them with promises of a full package: accommodation in a hostel, decent pay, food, training, and often education. They say that there will be a lump sum payment at the end; often that's at the end of a three-year contract. Many families anticipate using that lump sum to pay off family debt and to also provide a dowry for their daughters to be married. When you're impossibly poor, the idea of not having any dowry means that your daughter may not be able to get married, so that's very critical. Once that contract is signed, the girls are under the contract of the factory owner or broker, often in villages far away from their own and far away from the protection and support of community members.

The girls who end up in the most vulnerable situations often share root causes. They're poor. Their families are in debt, too often caused by alcoholism. They lack education and have few economic alternatives. There are gender-based disparities and cultural norms and caste discrimination. In short, they're the least powerful and most easy to exploit in the supply chain.

In the actual mills, which can vary widely from really small—we saw some with 60 people last week—to many that have thousands of girls within them, many of which we passed, girls face exploitative and dangerous working conditions, including low wages, withholding of wages, long working hours, and excessive mandatory unpaid overtime. They face many health risks due to excessive work, lack of protection equipment, and poor hygiene and nutrition. Some don't get to go to the toilet. Many girls have to leave the job before they end their contracts due to poor health and do not receive full pay or the lump sum payments that they were initially promised. Physical and sexual abuse linked to gender discrimination is a— [Technical difficulty—Editor]

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