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Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Labour rights, transparency concerns in Brazil's leather supply chain
The research, which spanned six months in 2024 studied more than 100 sources, including scholarly articles, studies, opinion pieces, and news coverage, as well as interviews with 19 key stakeholders. The report titled 'Toward promoting human rights and decent working conditions in the leather supply chain,' aims to provide a detailed examination of Brazil's leather sector, assessing both its global and national dimensions to pinpoint labour and human rights challenges, chart obstacles, and highlight ongoing efforts. FLA executive vice president and chief innovation officer Richa Mittal said: 'By illuminating challenges in upstream supply chains for commodities like leather, we aim to drive accountability and inspire collective actions toward a more equitable industry. This will help ensure dignity and respect for all workers at all levels of a company's global supply chain – not just Tier One.' The leather sector in Brazil with a valuation of approximately $3bn, holds the position of the world's third-largest after Italy and the US, notes the report. Annually, Brazil processes around 40m hides and serves 80 different international markets. The European Union receives a significant portion of these exports, accounting for 25% or roughly 8m hides. The industry is supported by 244 tanneries and provides employment to around 30,000 individuals within the country. Projections indicate that over the next 20 years, the Brazilian beef industry may witness a growth of 35%. The expansion of this sector is closely linked to the leather industry, which plays a critical role. Notably, Brazilian leather sees a high export rate with over 80% being shipped abroad, in stark contrast to beef production where only 20% reaches foreign markets. Supply chain opacity: A disconnect among farms, slaughterhouses, and tanneries leads to information gaps, reduced traceability of products, undisclosed operations and limited insight into labour conditions. Labour and human rights concerns: Workers are said to encounter considerable hazards throughout the leather production cycle: • Slaughterhouses grapple with ongoing worker mistreatment, psychological distress, gender bias, safety issues, and more • Tanneries are plagued by exposure to harmful chemicals, child labour risks, temporary employment practices, and an absence of unions or worker representation • Farms exhibit irregular employment practices; lack proper living conditions; and have issues with inadequate pay and potential modern slavery. Certifications: Current supplier certifications inadequately address labour conditions and human rights and fail to encompass upstream segments of the supply chain (slaughterhouses and farms) where the greatest risks lie. Collaboration deficit: The apparel, footwear and meat packaging sectors have not established structured partnerships to create traceability or enforce human rights due diligence (HRDD) throughout the entire value chain. The report outlines four approaches that businesses can implement to enhance traceability and integrate social and environmental considerations into the upstream supply chain: 1. Companies can develop proprietary traceability systems and human rights environmental due diligence (HREDD) processes that are predominantly directed through their Tier One suppliers. 2. Businesses may collaborate with third-party entities on traceability initiatives and evaluations that could adopt various methods — either top-down or bottom-up — to address issues (e.g., certification systems, blockchain technology, digital passports). 3. Corporations can form coalitions within their industry or across multiple sectors to concentrate on supply chain mapping, remediation efforts, and policy advocacy. 4. Firms might consider withdrawing from high-risk countries where they have limited influence over the sector due to geopolitical constraints. Impactt principal consultant Raquel Fisch said: 'This report brings much-needed attention to the parts of the leather supply chain where risks to workers are highest — and visibility is lowest. This research shows that workers on farms, in slaughterhouses, and in tanneries often face harsh conditions with little oversight or recourse. Yet these tiers are rarely covered by human rights due diligence. This report offers a valuable roadmap for companies to build traceability and accountability upstream, and to design systems that start with the realities of the workers most affected.' To disseminate the findings of this pivotal report further, FLA and Impactt will hold a public webinar on 28 May. In April this year, FLA urged the US to reverse global labour grant cuts as it said the move would damage efforts to combat child labour and forced labour worldwide. "Labour rights, transparency concerns in Brazil's leather supply chain" was originally created and published by Just Style, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Brazilian Leather Comes With Human Rights Risks. Identifying It is a Problem.
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. More from Sourcing Journal U.S. and Xinjiang Cotton Are Locked in a Trade War of Their Own Research Draws 'Probable' Links Between Shein and Xinjiang Textile Production Nike Relents on Thai Wage Theft Case, Albeit With 'Deficiencies' in Plan 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.'
