Brazil's ministry of labor has reported that 340 Brazilian companies were found using slave labor, including forced labor and people working in degrading conditions for little or no pay in rural and urban areas, a leading anti-slavery group has said.
340 companies. In 2016.
A "dirty list" published by the rights group Reporter Brazil this month revealed that 340 Brazilian companies from May 2013 to May 2015 employed people working in slave-like conditions, including in sweatshops producing clothes, in farms, cattle ranches, timber companies, construction and charcoal production. Leonardo Sakamoto, head of Sao Paulo-based Reporter Brazil, said his organisation, which works to expose slave labor, used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover the names of companies and individuals that were found to have slave labor by federal labor inspectors in Brazil.
Brazil defines slave labor as work carried out in degrading conditions or in conditions that pose a risk to a worker's health and or life. Forced labor, and working for free to pay off debts incurred with an employer, known as bonded labor or debt bondage, are also considered slave labor.
The country has had a long history with slavery. Brazil abolished the African slave trade in 1888, the last nation in the Western world to do so. By that time, Brazil had imported an estimated total of four million African people, 40% of all slaves shipped to the Western Hemisphere. However, slave trafficking and practices continued on, and weren’t actively addressed by the government until 1995.
In November 2003, Brazil’s Labor ministry started publishing a blacklist that informed the public on the companies and individual employers who were found to be using slave labor, a list that numbered
in the hundreds. Companies on the list are blocked from receiving government
loans and have restrictions placed on sales of their products. If a company pays all its fines and proves that it has improved working conditions after two years, it will be removed from the list.
But in late 2014, Brazil's Supreme Court ordered the Labor Ministry to suspend the release of the slave labor blacklist. The ruling came in response to an injunction filed by Brazil's Real Estate Developers' Association (Abrainc), whose members include the country's largest construction companies. Reporter Brazil,
a Brazilian human rights organization, is lobbying to make the list public again.