Upholding the Rights of Migrant Workers in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) by Ensuring Supply Chains are Exploitation Free: Viet Nam, Cambodia and Lao PDR

Global supply chains in the various manufacturing sectors are complex and involve a wide range of actors, working at multiple sites, with goods and workers crossing multiple borders. In this context, reports of human rights abuses, such as human trafficking for forced labour and other forms of labour exploitation, have raised concerns about the social costs of the industry, and have created pressure for business stakeholders to make changes to their production. Suppliers are under increasing pressure to ensure the protection of labour and gender-specific human rights of migrant workers.

The overarching objective of this project is to contribute to decreasing the exploitative recruiting practices of migrants within labour supply chains in the SEZs of Cambodia, Lao PDR and Viet Nam. This project seeks to empower businesses to better understand and respond to the complex human and labour rights challenges that are posed by unethical recruitment practices in their supply chains, and through the adoption of ethical practices, bring forward transformative change to the recruitment practices of Medium-Sized Enterprises and Multinational companies, their suppliers and the recruitment industry.

In pursuit of this objective, the project proposes two sets of inter-related outcomes that are targeted at two specific business sectors within the SEZs that have a high proportion of recruited female migrant workers:

• Improving the business sectors’ understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) principles related to ethical recruitment as a ‘smart investment’
• Enhancing the business sectors’ capacity to adopt ethical recruitment practices