Did The Red Cross Employ Slave Labour?
CBC Radio - The CurrentJust passing on an interesting story I picked up on while driving from Saskatoon to Qu’Appelle the other day. The above link will play the radio episode that I heard, while the link below will take you to a written article. Both sourced by the CBC and, as I understand, originating from an investigation done by the French Radio-Canada.
My opinion of all this is not great for the Canadian Red Cross. As a past, and potentially future, donator to the Red Cross I’m a little upset at they way the Red Cross seems to be treating these allegations. Their initial approach to the whole thing seems okay to me. After hearing a report from one of their field agents, they began with a high level internal investigation to determine if there was any truth to these allegations. They decided there was, then hired an external third party investigator to bring in the details. Seems reasonable so far.
The part that I’m upset with is what they did after that. I’m just going to sum it up with what they seem to be doing, vs what I want to be hearing from them.
This is an isolated case, of 40 or so workers and it has been fully dealt with
vs
Thank you for bringing to our attention this potentially wide spread problem. We will be sending our own field agents to Java to conduct a full review, and will compensate workers that were under compensated for their efforts in rebuilding after the Tsunami. Expect a report on our findings in the next 6 months.
We have a code of ethics that we make all contractors sign to prevent anything like this from happening.
vs
We realize that without proper inspection and follow up, we can not be certain that contractors are following our code of ethics. In the future we will be performing regular inspections at job sites using a rotation of our own field staff. We will take the lead from other NGOs and cancel contracts with employers who are found to be non-compliant.
We are not directly responsible for any abuse given to workers as this is the responsibility of our contractors
vs
As owner’s of the project, we take full responsibility for any worker abuse.
You get the idea.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/03/17/mtl-red-cross-tsunami-enquete.html
http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=34473&tid=001
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 9:29 am and is filed under charity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “Did The Red Cross Employ Slave Labour?”
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Virtually everything you suggest the Canadian Red Cross ought to do has, in fact, been done. The fact that the Radio-Canada/CBC report intentionally ignored or minimized those actions does not mean they did not occur. Reporting them would take away from the sensationalism of their report. The complainant in the Radio-Canada report claims to know that “thousands” (direct quote) of workers employed by the Red Cross were not paid. The Canadian Red Cross over the course of its work in tsunami reconstruction only employed approximately 2,000 workers. If “thousands” were not paid, why would they continue to work? And for that matter, why on earth would “thousands” of unpaid or underpaid workers stick around to build 6,600 earthquake- and tsunami resistant new homes in 22 communities? I understand from Red Cross friends that they offered to have CBC interview any or all of their field staff in Indonesia along with the contractors who hired scores of subcontractors, only two of whom apparently did not fully pay some of their workers in one of those 22 communities. Yet the Radio-Canada/CBC crew refused to even meet with Red Cross staff in Indonesia who would have first-hand knowledge of everything Radio-Canada they were reporting on. One has to question Radio-Canada’s ethics in covering allegations against these people yet refusing to meet with, let alone interview or fairly present, their views. They chose instead, after the storyline was completed and interviews in Indonesia were finished and they had packed up and returned to Canada to interview one senior Canadian Red Cross official in Ottawa, and then used only a couple of brief, partial quotes from him so the full context of his response is never given to viewers.
If posting a link to the original CBC story, why not include as well the link to the brief Red Cross statement in response? (http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=34473&tid=001).
Incidentally, your headline “Red Cross employs slave labour” leaves you wide open to legal action. You might wanna do something about that – unless of course you can prove the headline is true or that it constitutes “fair” comment, which are the only defences Canadian courts accept.
I should have added that in my earlier message, I wasn’t looking to get something posted online – just thoughts you may want to consider for any subsequent blog. Changing the headline and perhaps offering the Red Cross link would seem reasonable though.
RD, Toronto
Good comments, thank you. The title of the blog post was probably a bit too edgy. I took your advise and changed it to something a bit less accusative.
It may well be that there was only one isolated case affecting 40 or so workers, and the things I suggested may well have been done. My point was that the radio interview did not do much to bring that across. I would prefer if the Red Cross came across as leaders in this instance and spoke more of what they were doing to prevent anything like this from happening in the future, regardless of the accuracy of this CBC report.