The loss of one of Brazil’s most fundamental tools against slave labour amid the country’s worst recession in more than 100 years presents a serious risk of worker exploitation before the Olympic Games, according to labour activists.
Luiz Machado, national coordinator of Brazil’s anti-slavery programme at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), warns that the suspension of the so-called dirty list of companies caught using slave labour, combined with an extremely conservative congress and rising unemployment, creates the possibility for a rise in modern-day slavery.
“We have recently seen an increase in child labour, and this is usually linked to an increase in slave labour,” he said. “While the increase in child labour shows up in government household surveys, slave labour is a much more invisible crime.”
Machado is also concerned that the Olympics could provide an opportunity for further exploitation. “Whenever you have one of these mega-events, there is always an increase in migration,” he said. “Migrants are particularly vulnerable to slave labour.”
Though there have been no widespread reports of abuse so far, in November last year 11 workers contracted to build part of the Olympics media village were rescued from the degrading conditions of their living quarters by an anti-slavery taskforce. Each received 20,000 reais (£3,500) in compensation.
Launched in 2003, Brazil’s “dirty list” named companies that had been fined over the previous two years for using slave labour. The companies were in effect blacklisted, with state-backed banks unable to offer them loans, and sales of their products restricted.
But in late 2014, the supreme court ordered the labour ministry to suspend publication of the list, following a lawsuit filed by the Associação Brasileira de Incorporadoras Imobiliárias (Abrainc), the real estate developer’s association , which represented many of the organisations on the list. Abrainc argued the list was “manifestly unconstitutional” due to its “disrespecting of the fundamental right to a defence”.
“The ‘dirty list’ was one of the strongest tools against slave labour in the country,” said Leonardo Sakamoto, president of the NGO Repórter Brasil. “It allowed us to bring the private sector and banks into the fight against slave labour. Previously, they had said they wanted to help but they didn’t know how.”
In February, Repórter Brasil released the latest version of its own transparency list, drawn up following a freedom of information request for the names of the companies fined by the labour ministry for the use of slave labour from December 2013 to December 2015.
There are 340 companies on the list, but Sakamoto admits that it is far less comprehensive than the original “dirty list”. In the past, companies would only be removed from the list after two years if they had paid all their fines and changed their employment practices. The transparency list only contains the names of those punished in the past two years. “The big difference is that the new list doesn’t have the old stock of names,” he said. “Our list is smaller.”
Among the companies named in the list there are at least 18 construction companies, as well as cattle ranches, timber yards, farms and textile sweatshops.
Lojas Renner, a Brazilian high-street fashion retailer, was listed as employing 37 workers in conditions analogous to slavery in a sewing shop in São Paulo in 2014. Contacted by the Guardian, Lojas Renner said “it does not accept” its inclusion on the list, adding that the sewing shop in question had been sub-contracted by one of its suppliers, and that its suppliers had subsequently terminated the relationship.
Sakamoto, however, argued that such a response was a common excuse. “Under Brazilian legislation, you are responsible for the workers if they are working for you,” he said. “Outsourcing has been used as an excuse to exploit workers since the industrial revolution.”
Another company on the list, MRV Engenharia, is one of the biggest housebuilding companies in Brazil. Six people were liberated from one of its sites in 2013, but the company denied it had ever employed any of its workers in conditions analogous to slavery. The company had been previously cited five times on the labour ministry’s “dirty list”.
Brazil defines slave labour as work carried out in degrading conditions or in conditions that pose a risk to a worker’s health and/or life. Forced labour and debt bondage are also considered slave labour.
Since 1995, when Brazil formally acknowledged the use of slave labour in the economy, 50,000 people have been released from such conditions. But a bill being debated in the senate would significantly limit the definition of slave labour.
“We understand that there are concerns about what constitutes degrading conditions or risk to workers’ lives,” Machado said. “But we would like to work to clarify them rather than to see them abandoned.”
Though urban slavery has become more of a focus for the labour ministry in recent years, rural farms, ranches and timber yards still dominate the list.
Ilan Fonseca, a prosecutor from the ministry in the north-eastern state of Bahia, described the conditions he found in a raid carried out last week in a remote farmstead. “When we checked the area where the workers were living, we found there was no electricity, no fridge, no TV, no running water, no toilet of any kind,” he said. “They went to the toilet in the woods, their meat was preserved in salt and hung on a clothesline, and the tub they used for drinking water was full of mould and insects.”
During the raid, Fonseca and his colleagues were accompanied by a unit from the federal police because, he said, “in recent years, we have had many more death threats from farmers”.