Brazilian Leather Comes With Human Rights Risks. Identifying It is a Problem.

Yahoo

15-05-2025

Mention the risks of leather production in Brazil, and thoughts naturally turn to issues involving illegal deforestation for raising cattle in the Amazon, one of the world's biggest beef providers.
But the hide trade goes far beyond that, a new report from the Fair Labor Association pointed out Thursday. The labor-intensive, convoluted and, at the same time, fractured supply chains that produce everything from handbags to apparel to footwear to sporting goods are often riddled with treacherous working conditions that harbor child labor, exploitative wages, safety issues, irresponsible recruitment and attacks on freedom of association and collective bargaining.
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These human rights problems aren't unknown, said Richa Mittal, vice president and chief innovation officer at the Washington, D.C.-based multi-stakeholder organization. Between 1995 and 2022, the livestock industry was responsible for nearly half of the detected cases of slave labor in Brazil, according to estimates based on government data. The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of International Labor Affairs has also consistently flagged the sector for forced and child labor.
Still, the problem for fashion companies is that their visibility ends where the meat industry begins. Many of the certifications brands rely on, such as the Leather Working Group or the Brazilian Leather Certification of Sustainability, terminate at the tannery level, meaning there is little follow-up to conditions at the slaughterhouses or farms.
This isn't just a leather issue, Mittal said, but a broader fashion one. Fashion, she said, tends to look at traceability from a 'tier-to-tier perspective' that drops down from Tier 1 to Tier 2 and so forth. Very few brands, even those at FLA, have nailed traceability to the farm level. Even so, leather includes an additional complication.
'There is no certification, from a leather perspective, at the slaughterhouse or at the birthing farms. It's the meat packaging industry that has inspections there and that information is not available to the apparel sector,' she said. 'This is the merger of two different sectors, which is not the case in, for example, cotton, which is only used in textiles. Here, the main product is meat, which is used for food, and leather is a byproduct for apparel and footwear.'
Another problem is that most leather supply chain audits focus on environmental issues—for instance, chemical management—with a limited eye on decent work. At the same time, the human rights risks are manifold. The tanning process alone comes with prolonged exposure to hazardous substances, including confirmed or potential carcinogens, that have been linked to burns, skin diseases, respiratory illnesses and a significantly high rate of cancer. Injuries from heavy lifting are still common despite widespread mechanization. And the prevalence of informal jobs that provide neither benefits nor social insurance payments, coupled with the lack of on-site worker representation or trade unions, means employees are seldom able to advocate for themselves.
The precarity is further concentrated at the slaughterhouse stage. Direct recruitment, Mittal said, is becoming increasingly difficult because of the low pay and long hours. Some meat packers work with labor agents who recruit migrant workers from other parts of Brazil or from countries such as Haiti and Venezuela. With 90 percent of Brazilian slaughterhouses certified to produce halal meat, Muslim employees are in high demand. These are typically recruited through labor intermediaries such as agents who organize their employment and accommodation. In some instances, however, human trafficking is involved.
'There's also the repetitive work,' she said. 'Mental health issues have come up. Gender-based issues have come up because primarily the women are the ones working, but then the management is mostly men. There's no social safety net if they get into accidents, and the risk of amputation is quite high. And because nothing is documented, it's very hard to assess hours of work, very hard to assess compensation, very hard to assess the recruitment process, the contracts.'
Cattle farms are in their own black box, with fewer inspections and more informal work arrangements. Again, temporary work is common, as is migrant labor that can be linked to debt bondage, say, from having to purchase food and work equipment from their employers. Families that work on farms are usually paid by the owners to live in and manage the estate, Mittal said. Because children work with their parents, this raises the potential for child labor.
'So each tier presents its own issues, and I would say the reason why companies have not been able to take action is because there's very little link between tanneries and slaughterhouses and the farms, and this is where the meat industry plays a big role,' she said. 'It's quite secretive in a way.'
At the same time, fashion businesses are butting up against increasing regulation that demands they know where and by whom their products are made. The past several years alone have manifested mandatory supply chain due diligence acts in France, Germany, Norway, not to mention the broader European Union, that require companies to fully map out the extent of their social and environmental risks and report on their mitigation efforts. Most salient to the industry, Mittal said, are the EU's deforestation-free products and forced labor regulations.
'The regulations have only increased,' she said. 'It may not be a linear increase—right now we're in a regressive phase—but in the long run they will only grow. Companies should think of this time as not [a reason] to reduce their efforts, but to double down on their efforts in preparation for what is to come.'
While Mittal acknowledged that companies are 'not a monolith,' what that means at the 'very, very minimum' is for corporate leadership to kick-start talks with their materials teams to identify where their leather is coming from. What are the tanneries they're working with? Where are they located? How low in the supply chain can you go?
Companies that are starting out don't have to do everything, she said. They can start with a single country. Or follow the 80-20 rule by homing in on the 20 percent of their suppliers that are responsible for 80 percent of the work. Another thing Mittal advises, based on the FLA approach, is for businesses to break out of their silos and engage with others tackling the same issues. For 'really advanced' companies—of which there are none at the moment—this could include setting up country-level structures with local governments or working in cross-sectoral collaboration with meatpacking and other sectors.
Mittal's biggest message? Go beyond Tier 1. But any action based on a firm's available resources at all would be a plus.
'With supply chain mapping, I think a lot of companies think of it as a project that has a start date and it has an end date, but that's the mentality they need to get rid of,' she said. 'Like, quality is not a start and finish. Supply chain mapping is a continuous process you need to integrate into your human rights due diligence program.'