New legislation in Baltimore would require hotels to train staff to recognize any signs of forced prostitution. Baltimore officials have received reports of human trafficking occurring in the city despite the difficulty of identifying the crime. In this respect Human Trafficking may be more prevalent than previously known. This new bill will attempt to combat human trafficking as best it can.

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A recent International Labor Rights Forum report has found that there are still about 1.5 million children working on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, the world’s two top producers of cocoa. There has been significant effort to reduce child labor over the last ten years, but to little success. Cocoa‬ farming involves dangerous work this has been deemed one of the worst forms of child labor.

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Gap Inc., the parent company of Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy, is partnering with the investment fund Tau in an effort to address human rights violations within the Asian garment industry. The fund hopes to raise $1 billion in order to improve labor conditions in factories throughout Asia. The Tau fund and its investors intend to purchase minority stakes in Asian factories and install technology that will increase supply chain transparency, as well as upgrade environmental standards and improve productivity.

Tau cofounder Ben Skinner expressed the hope to create factories within the $1 trillion apparel industry that are the “most radically transparent and most radically compliant” in the world.

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Britain has named Kevin Hyland as its very first Anti-Slavery Commissioner in a continued campaign against human trafficking, forced labor, and child labor. Hyland is the former head of London’s Metropolitan Police human trafficking unit and is now bringing his expertise into the corporate atmosphere. The Anti-Slavery Commissioner role was created as a part of the Modern Slavery Bill which will require British corporations to annually disclose their efforts to tackle slavery in their supply chains.

The CHTCS team got the chance to speak with Hyland at the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Trust Women Conference in 2014. Hyland emphasized the need to monitor corporations because “once they know they are being monitored…they will want to have clean supply chains. If they fail they will be exposed – and no company in the world wants to be shown as employing slaves.”

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Tim Ballard is a former Homeland Security agent, who now heads up Operation Underground Railroad, a non-profit group that rescues trafficked kids. In this video interview, Mr. Ballard explains why he left his job to start OUR.

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Feminist T-shirts proudly worn by Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Harriet Harman are made in ‘sweatshop’ conditions by migrant women paid just 62p an hour, a Daily Mail investigation has revealed. The women machinists on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius sleep 16 to a room – and earn much less than the average wage on the island.

The £45 T-shirts carry the defiant slogan ‘This is what a feminist looks like’. But one of the thousands of machinists declared: ‘We do not see ourselves as feminists. We see ourselves as trapped.’ In this special investigation by the Daily Mail, Ben Ellery reveals exactly what is like for these women.

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The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs (“ILAB”) has released a toolkit to assist companies in identifying and rooting out forced and child labor in their operations and supply chains. The toolkit sets forth basic elements of an anti-trafficking compliance plan, including conducting risk assessments, developing and implementing a code of conduct, training employees, engaging stakeholders, monitoring compliance and conducting independent audits and reviews.

Federal and state authorities have implemented numerous laws to combat human trafficking, which means that increasingly so, companies must enact and evaluate their current policies to comply with these laws as well as to ensure that their procedures reflect well on a company’s corporate reputation. More than ever, companies are being required to detail efforts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking from their direct supply chains in order to comply with both state and federal regulations.

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A new report alleging “modern-day slavery” in five Indian textile mills prompted at least three of the Western retailers — X, Y, and Z — linked to the factories on Tuesday to pledge to take either punitive or remedial action.

X, Y, and Z represent real corporations whose names we removed as a courtesy.

The report, “Flawed Fabrics,” was released by the Center for Research on Multinational Corporations and the India Committee of the Netherlands, two human and labor rights nongovernmental organizations based in the Netherlands, detailing alleged egregious abuses found at Indian textile spinning mills in Tamil Nadu, considered a major hub in the global textile and knitwear industry.

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X will blacklist a spinning mill in southern India after a report claimed five manufacturers there use child labor and subjected workers, mostly women and girls, to “appalling” working conditions.

X will ban suppliers from using products made by Tamil Nadu-based Y, the Stockholm-based company said Tuesday. A Bangladeshi supplier has used yarn produced at the mill, though X doesn’t have a direct business agreement, spokeswoman Lena Enocson Almroth said in an e-mail. Y was “unwilling to cooperate with X in a transparent way.”

X, Y, and Z represent real corporations whose names we removed as a courtesy.

Most victims of human trafficking in the United States arrived in the country with a legal work visa, according to a new report by Northeastern University and the Urban Institute, and later became indentured servants after their immigration papers were taken away by traffickers and recruiters.

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