Hello everyone, my name is Vasily Kigaz Yaki and I'm working with Whitturated International
is a small non-profit organization based in Berlin and today I'm going to talk about the
beyond compliance project and the work we do at Whitturated Together with Walk Free, Walk
Free is an organization, a human rights organization that focuses on tackling motor slavery.
So in this presentation I'm going to talk about how we do assessments or motor slavery
statements, our approach to research and what the results showcase about corporate reporting
on motor slavery.
So before we dive into the project I would like to take a minute to talk a little bit about
motor slavery and I'm pretty sure that everyone has heard the term before.
A motor slavery as a term includes a set of legal concepts and includes including
forced labor that bond its force merits and human trafficking.
The truth is that it is a still a significant issue globally and impacts millions of
people worldwide.
It is estimated that more than 50 million people today are affected by motor slavery
and at least 28 million of people are enforced labor.
The reality is that the products that we buy and use daily from our clothes to our electronics
can access the motor slavery as forced labor still persists in supply chains of many industries.
So what can we do to prevent motor slavery?
We actually need really strong motor slavery legislation that protects all work with
the supply chains and holds companies accountable.
Companies must ensure supply chains are guaranteed to identify and address motor slavery
risks.
There is a little bit of a reluctance from companies to publish the suppliers because they
think they lose competitive advantage, but the truth is without supply chain transparency
is very difficult to tackle motor slavery.
Companies must engage in combating motor slavery by taking responsibility of their operation
and the partnerships.
So the UK and Australian motor slavery acts were among the first laws that came into place
specifically address motor slavery.
There require companies above certain revenue thresholds to produce annual motor slavery
statements and they aim to increase transparency in global supply chains.
Later more laws came into action in different countries, but in our project we are focusing
on the UK and Australian motor slavery act.
So since 2016, we curate and work free have partnered to analyze motor slavery statements.
Using in the beginning 18 and then we extended to 21 criteria, we have assessed over 2000
statements and thousands of contributors and volunteers have participated to this project
and we have engaged for at least 20 universities.
So the motor slavery laws ask companies to report on motor slavery.
And the question that we had in the beginning of the project was are the companies treating
that as a ticking box exercise or are they taking any measures to actually combat motor
slavery and they are going actually beyond the compliance of the law.
So how do we do the research?
We are taking an open and community driven approach.
So our approach is based on community building and crowdsourcing.
We have a global community and volunteers that assess the motor slavery statements.
We have accessible metrics we make.
We try to simplify the metrics in a sense that we allow an enable participants from
diverse background to participate with this project.
Our methodology is open and transparent.
Even when it comes to analysis we try to make our methodology as transparent as possible.
And we follow an open data approach.
I think we think this is really important.
All the results and the data are licensed under creative commons for point to owe by attribution.
And in a sense that we want to allow other civil society organizations to use this data for advocacy.
Researchers and also even investors if they want to use this data to see what companies
that they invest in do to tackle motor slavery.
And also when it comes to research, we want to think that we empower a little bit.
We do a little bit of power and through education that we educate a little bit.
The volunteers on topics like Monteslavery.
So the most important aspect of our approach is our community.
In the beginning, every year we do a couple of rounds of research.
And we have an open call for volunteers.
We have a passion and knowledgeable volunteers in our partners network and in our network as well.
We're training them on the metrics and on the platform that we do the research.
And we have regular cut ups with them and we have a Slack channel that we are communicating
and they can raise questions if they have any.
And we always analyze the contributors in the reports that we are producing in our communications.
And in any chance we have.
So the research process includes several steps.
So in the beginning, we make sure that we have comprehensive and clear methodologies for assessments.
To make it as easy as possible for them to proceed with their assessments.
We allocate the companies among contributors.
And we collect the data and the research comments in one place.
And we do peer reviewers and quality assurance of also the final research.
And at the end of the cycle, we do refine the pathologies based on the feedback that we get
from the volunteers for the next round to have some better guidance in place.
So the research is done using Wikivate.org, the Wikivate platform.
And so for any of you that you are not familiar, I think most of you,
Wikivate is an open data, open source and open research platform that brings corporate
environmental, social and governance data in one place,
making accessible, comparable and free for everyone.
So the research of the platform is actually organized around research projects.
In these projects, we have certain metrics, we define certain metrics that we want
our volunteers to research and also center companies that we want them to research.
So this is a research project for research and model slavery statements.
Here the volunteer wants to research the collaborations and memberships metric
to see if the company engages with any nonprofit organizations that they do
multislavery work and they have to select the year that they want to research,
then they try to find if there is an existing source of the platform.
So there is already a multislavery statement for the company there.
So they go ahead, very view and read the multislavery statement,
they find the answer and they select the source and then they have to answer the question
and leave comments citing where they find exactly the answer in the document.
So and then the next important step is data verification, the verification of the answers.
So we consider in which you read that one answer is verified when more than one person
have actually came to the same conclusion. So the volunteers, they go ahead and they are
assigned a different company that they have to check, double check, they work that
some other volunteer has done. So here we have the gap incorporation and here we have
actually the volunteer reviewing the answer, they can go back, they can see the comments and
they can also review again the source and they can find out if indeed the answer that the previous
researcher found is correct and they go ahead either of their flagging, the answer or they confirm
the answer. So here they have verified the answer on the platform and yeah that is also a part of.
So another ingredient when it comes to the metrics is that at Wikirate we have different types
of metrics, we have research metrics and calculated metrics, research metrics, function as building
blocks for analysis and on top of research metrics we can write coffee scripts formulas to
actually pool data from different metrics and come to a certain conclusion. For instance for the
UK and Australia Motors Library, there are different criteria that the companies have to address
in the Motors Library statements. So through the calculated metrics we can pool
the data in one metric and he've answered to additional questions. So here we have this
an example of a calculated metric which is if the company needs the minimum criteria under the
UK Motors Library legislation you can see the input metrics and also the formula that is
written in coffee script. There are three mandatory criteria plus to that we have to make sure that
at least the statement have fully assessed by the researchers before we pool an answer to the
to the platform. So here you can also see a little bit more granularity, you can see the calculated
answer and then the underlying answers from this metric. So what are we find? What the research
reveal? Before we go to the results of the project, I would like to just remind you the initial
question that we have when we started the project and especially the first part of the question
are the companies treating the statements as a taking box exercise. We actually consider that
at least the companies report and meet the minimum requirements so they address all the requirements
that the law states. But this is was not the case so only 25% of companies
reporting their obligations under the relevant MSA, measures library legislation. So 75% of
companies fail to meet the minimum criteria and that showcases a big compliance gap. There is a
lack of transparency 50% of the statements disclose no information on the companies apply chains
and 86% do not report any incidents. There is an absence of worker centric policies, 88%
of the statements do not disclose direct worker mediation. There is an overlook on modern slavery
risks, 52% of companies have not identified any modern slavery risks within their operations
and supply chains. And there was a lack of remediation on policies, 51% of companies do not
disclose having remediation policies in place to respond incidents of modern slavery.
So there was also a limited risk beyond tier one, 74% of companies do not have
any modern slavery policy that applies to stakeholders beyond the tier one suppliers.
And the findings showcase that there is a long way to go before we can say companies
do enough to prevent modern slavery risks. So how are the data used? In the context of these
projects we have built a data dashboard to showcase and summarize the results of these projects.
And our main goal was for our partners and other CSOS to use these two as an advocacy tool
for policy change and business behavior change. So the research is not just numbers.
There is a real life and real world impact on shaping policy. Our partners in work free
over the years they have done data driven recommendations on the UK and Australia
and modern slavery reviews. And we several adopted already in Australia.
And the evidence from the research have been also used for advocacy on adoption for adoption
on corporate stability due diligence and directive in the EU. But also it's not just policy.
The research and the results of the research are saving business practices.
Data on the UK companies responses were leveraged to inform updates to the UK,
modern slavery guidance through the UK force labor forum. And actually work free also
engages directly with businesses to improve the reporting and due diligence processes.
So what's the future holds for the project? The project is ongoing. It keeps continues.
And we want to support more assessments and we want to scale also the research.
But the end of the month we're planning to integrate an annotated data set from
Mela AI Institute of 5,000 fully assessed Australian modern slavery statements.
And as a part of a pilot project for scaling up the resources we want to
experiment on using an integrating Mela AI model into our pipeline to automate
the assessment of new and unseen documents. So if you're interested in contributing,
you can sign up to volunteer on this work. There are also different projects looking.
Contributors is not only we're focusing on different topics, not only model slavery.
And you can contact us to share ideas and form partnerships. And yeah, also we create
is under an open license. And you can also create your own dashboards if you want to leverage
any of the data set that exists already on the platform. And yeah, that was everything from my side.
And thank you for all of you.
Will you be taking questions?
Do you want points for the talk? I'm curious if there's been any engagement from a policy
to my case for you? If you can repeat?
Yes, so the question was, if there was an engagement from policy makers based on the results,
yeah, there were work free has already done several recommendations for
making the law more strict.
Some of them they have passed, some of them they are still working progress.
So there is change, but usually when it comes to policy making things are getting a little bit more
time, then they want that we would like to take especially in cases and in topics like Monterey slavery.
I'd like to implement any questions. Many of the companies touched the reactant.
Because if there's any like, this is like an open country process, or as we said for us,
where you're going to get people to meet their revision and say we can so much and prove something.
So first of all, does this happen in a second? Is this political figures or people?
So the question was, if we had any reactions from companies when it comes to their
to us reviewing their modest slavery statements,
we didn't, we never had so far companies coming to us discussing their modest
slavery, but work free specifically tries to engage with certain companies to help them improve
their policies when it comes to how they report, but also to their due diligence processes.
And the second part of the question, because there was a second part of the question, can you
remind me? Yes. So you explain the same questions to multiple people and then you compare their
answers, right? So the question was that if we present the same questions to different people
and we compare the answers. No, we don't do that. What happens is we have one researcher,
if you, the statement, and then we have another researcher come back and check if the answers
that the other researchers have found are correct or not, based also on the comments and they
can verify or not the answer that it was given by the researcher.
Yeah, hello, thank you very much for sharing this. One thing we have seen with the
change in the legislative landscape right now is with the corporate sustainability report in Europe,
the things that companies have to say about ESG, they have to be assured by an auditor. Is there
anything like that for the modern slavery statements so that you can tell if they're not lying?
I don't think, sorry to repeat the question. Is there any auditors that have a look on
the modern slavery statements? So, no, they're not any auditors to really say if indeed companies,
but we do some complementary work on that. We have another project, they call value chains,
and we try to research what happens in the factory level. So, if we have, for instance,
what happened with wages, we have a lot of companies promising that they ensure living wages.
And we go to the, we have partners that they are actually working on the ground and they're
asking these questions, how much do you earn? And then we can say, okay, what the company says,
they say yes, but we've seen like 10 factories, this is not the case, because they are not paid
in the living wage.
Okay, so the question was, and correct, if I didn't understood correct the question,
if we have any processes in place for how we can hear a bit because I'm not sure that I understood
the question.
So, other projects that we are working on? So, we focusing specifically on corporate
responsibility and sustainability. We have projects and we had projects in the past that they are
researching, this is an ability developing goals on reports and sustainability reports that
companies publish. But what we want to do, and this is in our plan for maybe one of the next
two years, we want to try to bring not company reported data, because there is just what we see
what the company says, but we want to find ways and we want to form collaborations with other
parties in order to bring more data to verify what the company says about, this is an ability
development goals or about motorslavery or about different topics.