0:07 Madi Minges: From the School of International Service at American University in Washington, this is Big World, where we talk about something in the world that truly matters.

0:16 Judy Gearhart: They're estimating that the private sector benefits $236 billion a year from profits illegally gained through forced labor in the global economy. There are many cases of fishers literally walking ashore because they've been abused for months or years, and then they finally get close enough to port that they can jump off.

0:41 Madi Minges: That was SIS research professor Judy Gearhart. She joins us to discuss international labor organizing and workers' rights. All around the globe, labor organizing is taking place in industries across the global supply chain. Transnational supply chain advocacy networks have emerged to help connect labor organizers' demands to international campaigns to reform industry and protect workers' rights. In today's episode, we're talking about the challenges industry workers face in the global supply chain and discussing the stories of organizers who are pushing to improve working conditions.

1:19 Madi Minges: I'm Madi Minges and I'm joined by Judy Gearhart. Judy is a senior researcher at the Accountability Research Center and a professor at SIS. She is also the host of The Labor Link Podcast, which spotlights the brave individuals organizing industry workers around the world. Her research focuses on the nexus between government and corporate accountability and transnational organizing strategies. Here is our conversation. Judy Gearhart, thank you so much for joining Big World and welcome to the show.

1:54 Judy Gearhart: Thank you, Madi. It's good to join you.

1:58 Madi Minges: To start us out, I would love if you could help to kinda situate our listeners and describe some of the work and the research that you do.

2:09 Judy Gearhart: So I'm a research professor at the School of International Service at American University, specifically within a research center called the Accountability Research Center. Everything we do is looking at the role of membership-based organizations and how they are holding those in power accountable. My work specifically is focused on worker-driven corporate accountability, which, even though I talk about corporate accountability a lot, there's always a government piece to it. So it's also about ensuring the government is upholding the protections that they're meant to uphold for workers. In the past three years, I've been very focused on the seafood industry, which I have worked on many different supply chains around the world, but there's so much to do in seafood. It's just completely drawn me in.

3:06 Madi Minges: Judy, before we launch into a broader conversation on workers organizing and protections and on corporate accountability, I'm curious if you could discuss some of the challenges and abuses that workers currently face in the global supply chain.

3:24 Judy Gearhart: Yeah, thank you. So one of the most difficult nuts to crack is the recruitment pipeline or the labor supply chain, if you will. And I know it best in the seafood industry, where you have large numbers of migrant fishers. Indonesia seems to be supplying probably the largest percentage of migrant fishers to the industrial fishing vessels, distant water fleet globally. And the process for them to get on those vessels is like a labyrinth. They are often recruited from their villages, so there's maybe one or two recruiters involved until they get to the recruitment agency that sends them abroad. That recruitment agency tends to house them before they go out to sea. They tend to do some kind of basic training, but those recruitment agencies are really the ones who are managing the contract, and they do it in partnership with another recruitment agency in the flag state where the fisher's going.

4:39 Judy Gearhart: But the real employer of the fisher is the vessel captain, vessel owner. So you have so many different parties involved in contracting and employing the fisher that there are just many opportunities for them to become indebted, many opportunities for them to have their rights violated or repressed. Once they're on the vessel and they're out to sea, especially in distant water fishing, they're often out to sea for a year, sometimes two years before they go to port.

5:16 Judy Gearhart: You have transshipment at sea where the fish gets off, but the fishers don't. And so we've had fishers who die on the vessels because of malnutrition, because they get sick and they don't get medical attention in time. Fishers who are not able, even when the vessel pulls into port, they're not able to get off the vessel. And so one of the big campaigns that, my former organization is Global Labor Justice, and they're promoting Wi-Fi at sea for fishers. This is really important because if you have these fishers at sea, and now pretty much all of these vessels have Wi-Fi. If the fishers don't have a way to communicate, then there's no way to know that they're in distress.

6:04 Judy Gearhart: So this problem with the multiple recruitment agencies is something that many migrants face. And then when they get back, they will try and file a complaint. And maybe they're working on a vessel, their contract is in Korean or Taiwanese, and it's according to Taiwan law or Korean law, as it should be, but they signed a contract in Bahasa that may or may not match up with the laws and contracts for the one they're actually working under. So there's jurisdictional issues, there are communication issues, there's real abuse and distress that occurs that just fuels and facilitates these really high numbers in forced labor in the global economy.

6:54 Madi Minges: Judy, can you talk about what makes migrant workers particularly vulnerable in this landscape?

7:03 Judy Gearhart: So there are two ways they're vulnerable. There's the whole contracting, legal, jurisdictional ways in which they're vulnerable and the inability to organize, the legal restrictions on that. But there's also the day-to-day cultural challenges, language challenges, the inability to communicate or seek help. Even if they were to have access to a port, would they be able to find someone who can support them in their language?

7:38 Judy Gearhart: This tends to make them vulnerable, but the debt bondage and the fact that often their migration status is tied to their employer means that they don't necessarily have a way to get home, if they were to leave their job. Or they don't have a way to get another job, if they were to leave their job, they have tied visa regimes where your visa is dependent on your employer, which makes you incredibly vulnerable to whatever that employer's going to throw at you until, of course, you really can't stand it anymore. There are many cases of fishers literally walking ashore because they've been abused for months or years, and then they finally get close enough to port that they can jump off and walk ashore. And this has happened in New Zealand and South Africa.

8:30 Madi Minges: Wow. I know a lot of your work focuses on workers' rights, transnational labor organizing, and corporate accountability, like you just mentioned. I would love if you could talk a little bit about some of the current and historical issues surrounding supply chain governments, and particularly how do those issues impact workers?

8:56 Judy Gearhart: So global supply chains have been around for a few centuries, but over the past few decades, especially starting in the '90s, they became increasingly global. As costs of communication and transportation went down, it became much easier for even small companies to start to bring in goods from other countries. And so you see the US manufacturing base going abroad. You see a lot of agricultural products that we never had when I was a child, such as tropical fruit, completely accessible all year long. And that is pervasive around the world. Now, up until the '90s, there was an effort at the UN, driven by countries in the global south, to push the UN, it was the Commission on Transnational Corporations, to look at how to regulate global corporations. That then ended in '93, and there was a process that began at the UN to discuss: What does global governance of these supply chains look like?

10:13 Judy Gearhart: What are the human rights duties or responsibilities of global corporations? Because global north companies in particular, but any large global corporation, has so much power over their small suppliers. They can just country jump and have one producer in Vietnam competing against another producer in Cambodia, for example. And so how do you hold them accountable? In 2011, the UN unanimously adopted the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and that document became the line in the sand to really move towards corporate responsibilities and really defining, look, under the human rights conventions, it does talk about the state's duties to uphold these conventions, but in the chapô text of all the international human rights conventions, it talks about everyone's responsibility to uphold these rights.

11:28 Judy Gearhart: And the UN guiding principles are divided up into protect, respect, remedy. It's the state's obligation to protect the rights of workers in global supply chains. It's the company's duty, responsibility to respect the rights of workers throughout their supply chains. And then it's both government and corporation responsibility to ensure remedy. That moment really changed the way people think about global supply chains and their governance.

12:03 Madi Minges: And I'm curious how effective has that been since that was passed by the UN? Has it worked? Has it made things better for workers?

12:15 Judy Gearhart: So we've really made progress in terms of the expectations on companies, and even some of the laws pushing them to do more. In the US, we have not gotten to the point of regulating our global transnational corporations. We tend to use the forced labor import bans. The Tariff Act, which was revised in 2016, is quite a powerful tool, and it was integrated into the USMCA, asking Canada and Mexico to also refuse to allow goods, to turn away goods at port for which there is reasonable cause to believe they were made in whole or in part with forced labor. So that law, as much as it's not requiring companies to do human rights due diligence, it creates a risk of serious financial challenges if they don't conduct adequate human rights due diligence. So we've seen a real evolution just in the past 15 years in how we're holding companies accountable.

13:27 Judy Gearhart: At the same time, the International Labor Organization just, in 2024, published new numbers on forced labor, and they're estimating that the private sector benefits $236 billion a year from profits illegally gained through forced labor in the global economy. And that is a 37% increase from when they last estimated it in 2014. So yes, we have more mechanisms, but we're still really struggling to prevent these abuses, even the egregious abuses. And I'm working on getting companies to look more at the root causes such as the repression of workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively.

14:25 Madi Minges: Judy, I know you spend a lot of time through your research talking with labor organizers. I would love if you could tell us a bit about some of the movements or workers' groups that you've interacted with in some of those organizers, and perhaps there's an anecdote or a story that really stands out to you that's emblematic of some of the struggles that people are facing in the global supply chain. Could you share a little bit about that?

14:59 Judy Gearhart: Yeah. So I would love to tell you a story of resilience and hope. And I have to say, I think I draw a lot of my energy from the organizers, the workers and the organizers that I meet and collaborate with around the world, Jon Hartough from the International Transport Workers' Federation. He tells a story about one of the organizers that he works with. He's a migrant fisher in Thailand. And in Thailand, migrant fishers, they can join a union if it exists, but they don't have the right to form and lead a trade union. So they're pretty much, it's illegal for them to organize a union because fishers are working on vessels where the only Thai nationals on their vessel tend to be the captains. So the other workers are all migrants. So if you're all migrants and you can't lead a union, there's no way to form it.

16:03 Judy Gearhart: But the International Transport Workers' Federation has been working with the Fisher Rights Network to develop pathways for these fishers to raise complaints. And this one fisher, he raised a complaint. All the workers got together and said, "These conditions are really intolerable and we need to raise this issue with the captain." And they asked him to do it. And so he did, and then he was thrown overboard ...

16:32 Madi Minges: Oh, my goodness.

16:32 Judy Gearhart: And shot while he was in the water and he survived by some incredible good fortune. But what's so inspiring is that fisher continues to organize. And it's people like that that really make you appreciate and think there's so much more work to be done and we should be supporting them. The other great story I'd love to point to is Kalpona Akter who is also featured on the podcast and she was an apparel worker in Bangladesh for many years. She had to go to work because her father got sick when she was about 11, when she was in fifth grade. And she worked to support the family and then she quickly became an organizer, was blacklisted, continued organizing, spent a month in jail at one point, had to live through her colleague being killed.

17:35 Judy Gearhart: It was a really rough many, many years and she continues to organize. She's truly one of my heroes and she's someone who, despite leaving school in fifth grade, has given testimony in the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings. She's learned international policy and national policy, and she's advising the government on different policies now, now that there's more political opening. So I can say that this work, connecting people internationally, using all these mechanisms to support worker organizing, not only does it help in the specific moment of the issue, the crisis at hand, it also means that there are leaders like Kalpona who are coming up and becoming even global leaders in the discussion of how do we ensure workers' rights?

18:34 Madi Minges: Thank you, Judy, for sharing those stories. I think it's really powerful to hear those testimonies. Can you speak about what does that kind of organizing look like in practice and how successful has it been in bringing change for workers?

18:54 Judy Gearhart: So there's the organizing that happens on the ground, right? The examples that I just shared of people like Kalpona who are running worker centers, helping workers file complaints. The idea is eventually for workers to form trade unions and bargain collectively with their employers. A lot of times that outreach has to start with providing women workers childcare options or helping workers file a complaint and get money back or file for personal injury. A lot of the trade unions, especially in a context where there's a risk to joining a trade union, they have to first demonstrate to workers that they are helpful and important. And then from there, it can grow quite quickly.

19:45 Judy Gearhart: And a lot of the organizing is demonstrations and coming together for changing laws that are not effectively protecting them, and then also obviously organizing workplaces and trying to bargain collectively. That's ultimately what they're trying to do. But how that works transnationally is basically, it's good old-fashioned solidarity on some levels. So the US has a lot of laws, trade policies that punish countries for not upholding human rights laws, labor laws, and other, sometimes environmental laws as well. The way that we are able to trigger them is this relationship that happens between the international organizations, international non-governmental organizations for the most part, and the national organizers.

20:37 Judy Gearhart: So you have NGOs in the global north or in Europe and the US in particular, but also increasingly in other countries, who are working with worker organizations in a country like Bangladesh or Thailand or Vietnam or Indonesia to try and connect them and say, "Oh, you're having a hard time organizing and you're producing for Carrefour or H&M. Let's look at how we raise this issue in France or Sweden or the US and use these different transnational mechanisms, trade, aid, diplomacy mechanisms to push for change in your workplace." So that's a lot of what transnational organizing is, but through it all, those NGOs and trade unions on the ground are also trying to get their government to change its law, to uphold its law. They never stop trying to work on their own national legal regime, even while they're also trying to look at how do we mobilize internationally?

21:53 Madi Minges: In hearing that, I guess the question that comes to my mind is what additional things can be done? What should be done to help workers to continue to improve working conditions?

22:07 Judy Gearhart: I think first and foremost, we need to think about workers' agency. It's not all about how we can save the victims of human trafficking and forced labor. It's about how do we enable workers to speak for themselves and signal and access legal recourse and remedy? How do we enable them to organize and have a voice at work? And when I say voice at work, I really mean a collective voice at work because one person having a voice and the possibility to complain does not address the systemic problems. Multiple fishers having the right to organize and bargain collectively and have a collective voice at work, that is where you can actually ensure that systemic level changes happen in a workplace and all rights are respected. So really, if we can't address workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively, we really are never going to address the root causes of all these other egregious abuses, whether it's forced labor or child labor or horrendous health and safety standards.

23:20 Madi Minges: I wanted to turn toward the US briefly here. Obviously there's been a major economic shift under the current administration via major cuts to USAID and grants sponsored by the International Labor Affairs Bureau. I know those have been vital in fights to stop forced labor and raise labor standards globally. What impact could those cuts have or what impact are they having both in the US and globally?

23:57 Judy Gearhart: Well, it's exactly what we're talking about. Thank you. That's a great question because the best way for the US to compete, have fair competition with other countries is to not have those worker rights undermined in production phases. And the International Labor Affairs Bureau, ILAB, of the US Department of Labor and USAID have played a critical role in ensuring that the workers had rights to be able to organize, that the labor laws were being applied, that the International Labor Organization was working with parties in different countries to improve labor regulations and the implementation of those labor regulations, as well as the support that was being given to worker organizations and their engagement with this process. I think that a lot of that funding played an absolutely critical role in raising labor standards abroad. And without it, we're going backwards. And it's really frustrating to see how we're slipping.

25:16 Judy Gearhart: In the seafood industry, really, it's only been over the past 10 years that we've seen a surge in fisher organizing. We put out a report last year, a six country study on fisher organizing, and it's almost three fourths of the organizations we interviewed formed in the last 10 years, many of them, because of programs that were funded through the International Labor Organization. Some of those resources came from ILAB or USAID to help fisher organizing really get a toehold in an industry where, as I've described, it's incredibly difficult to exercise your rights to organize and bargain collectively. So undercutting those programs and then throwing tariffs around is really just ... It's digging a deeper hole away from where we were hoping to go. I will say this administration is very serious about pushing back on forced labor and that has continued, the pushback, and they're trying to get more countries to adopt forced labor import bans.

26:27 Judy Gearhart: That's important. They've made tremendous progress on that, but without the boots on the ground that were supported by USAID and ILAB, you don't have a way to build up the resistance to abuse. So we can stand at our port playing whack-a-mole on every case of egregious abuse, but we're never going to solve all those cases of forced labor if we don't get to the root cause. And the only way you get to the root cause is by building capacity, by building regulatory infrastructure in those countries. And that's where USAID and ILAB were really playing a critical role. I'm not sure how it's getting replaced right now. Yeah. I mean, I'm working in countries where I have seen the vacuum left behind from really good programs that were cut and it's just left to small organizations on the ground to figure out how to carry on.

27:39 Madi Minges: Judy, to end our conversation, we mentioned it a little bit before, but I'd love if you could talk a little bit more about the podcast that you host and where people can find more of your work and more of your research.

27:56 Judy Gearhart: Thank you, Madi. So the real purpose of The Labor Link podcast is so much of my research is based on qualitative interviews with the people on the ground doing the organizing. And at ARC, we like to try and work with our partners to co-publish or to help support them in the documentation of the issues they're working on, the challenges they're facing, but I pretty quickly realized that the interviews I had with them were already really cogent. So when I first started going through transcripts and listening again to interviews I'd done with worker organizers, I thought, wait, I should just share this. And so I've been gradually building up a few episodes, there's probably a dozen now, sharing the perspectives of the people organizing the workers who make the goods coming into our global economy.

28:52 Madi Minges: Judy Gearhart, thank you so much for joining Big World to talk about workers' rights and international organizing. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

29:02 Judy Gearhart: Thank you, Madi. I really appreciate the time. I really appreciate you and Morgan for doing this. I hope to be in contact soon.

29:12 Madi Minges: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American University. Our podcast is available on our website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen. If you like this episode, please leave us a rating or review. Our theme music is, It was Just Cold by Andrew Kodman. Until next time.