Migrant sugar cane workers in Maharashtra, India
Below are Perspective summaries that depict how LaborVoices can serve migrant workers, brands and social science researchers.
The Migrant Worker Perspective
Migrant workers often face multiple disadvantages caused by illegal and unfair practices in the labor supply chain: inhumane work environments; illegal labor recruiter practices; bribes and other hidden salary deductions, creating widespread debt bondage; and lack of enforcement of fundamental labor rights. Desperate migrant workers are often tricked into these organized human trafficking operations, which force them to work in unforeseen locations for wages that are insufficient, even to pay their expenses. To workers, this modern day slavery is an unavoidable risk; but with limited information, they often have no other choice.
LaborVoices aims to eliminate these labor abuses by providing workers with the information they need—whom to trust and why—when they most need it, before they migrate. We gather this information from the only true experts: workers, themselves. We’re enforcing labor market transparency by leveraging ubiquitous mobile technology to help migrant workers identify these abusive employers and labor recruiters, safely and anonymously. LaborVoices provides the platform for workers to request, create, and share information on their own working conditions, while developing reputations of recruiters, factories and employers, facilitating sound pre-migration decisions.
We believe when workers can create and share these reputations, we’ll make it much harder for traffickers to recruit victims, putting them out of business, for good.
The Brand Perspective
Brands are becoming increasingly concerned about the risks posed by the treatment of workers in their supply chains, in both recruitment and employment practices. Because many brands operate at a distance from their suppliers, they are often unable to effectively engage them on practices inside workplaces.
Because brands don’t understand the specifics of what their supply-chain workers endure, they can’t manage the risks associated with labor abuse. Brands need inexpensive, accurate, real-time monitoring of supply chains, to effectively manage these risks by selecting responsible suppliers. Third parties, from NGOs to unions to professional labor inspectors, each can only satisfy a few of these criteria at a time. Brands need access to the collective intelligence of workers, themselves, to see crises before they happen.
Supply chain managers may use LaborVoices as a source for labor market intelligence. They request customized analytic products that fit their individual needs, often complementing existing inspection protocols with more immediate, accurate, and inexpensive worker feedback.
With the LaborVoices Open Information Platform, we share our data, safely and securely with the entire world, establishing trust and reliability with all stakeholders. Through LaborVoices Analytics, we aggregate worker feedback to help brands negotiate effectively to ensure that supply-chain partners eliminate abusive treatment in a quantitative, results-based framework. Brands, both individually and collectively, can use LVOIP and LVA to develop common standards for responsible and accountable recruitment, and to measurable improve the practices of suppliers.
We believe that a transparent labor market is the foundation for an effective partnership between brands, suppliers, recruitment agencies, and workers—the key to protecting vulnerable people, and rewarding responsible business.
The Researcher Perspective
Researchers are recognizing the increasing importance of labor migration at all levels of modern interaction: demographic, social, economic and political. Simply put, migrant workers are now an integral part of growth and development processes with both positive and negative impacts for the migrants themselves and for the countries of origin and destination. Effective research on these populations is fundamentally hampered by their low visibility, marginalized status, and relocation patterns. The Holy Grail of migration research might be real-time monitoring of migration flows (instead of snapshots), constant worker feedback (instead of surveys) and continuous perception indexing (to complement incentive experiments). Simply put, if academics really knew what workers think, we’d have a radical advance impacting all of social science.
LaborVoices offers a first step in this direction. We gather, house, and distribute information by migrant workers from all over India, and eventually, the world. By tapping workers, themselves, we gather incredibly diverse, sophisticated, and openly-biased information on migration, employment, human services and life at the bottom-of-the-pyramid—available via the LaborVoices Open Information Platform. With this data, researchers gain rare insight into business and governance models in remote regions of the world, where information is often scarce and difficult to obtain. We hope developers will help us aggregate worker sentiment into useful analytical tools, applicable both to academia and activism, social workers and supply-chain managers.
We believe that access to the most personal points-of-view of labor abuses will facilitate global accountability—fostering effective and efficient labor markets, advocacy, negotiations, and regulations; leading to more pro-worker policies and efficient migrant worker regulations.