Modern slavery and Ethical, Social and Corporate Governance: The advantages to businesses in doing the right thing

Published

Mar 26 2021

Written By

I am the head of the firm's International Commercial Group, and established the cyber-security team back in 2010. I am a commercial lawyer engaged in providing a full spectrum of legal support to clients for their day to day business.

Elizabeth Lang

Partner
UK

I am a partner specialising in employment law. I am based in our London office but work as part of the International HR Services team. I work for a wide range of clients, companies and individuals, advising on a wide range of issues and helping them to resolve employment law issues.

Practices

Regions

Western Europe

Countries

Ensuring the rights of workers and working conditions in supply chains should be a core part of corporate compliance with the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Recent investigations highlighting poor pay and working conditions of UK clothing manufacturing workers have been the subject of concerning newspaper headlines. In some cases, concerns were raised not only in relation to working practices, pay, health and safety, but also to suspicions that there may be issues of human trafficking, tax evasion and tax fraud.

What are the lessons that we can learn from these incidents? And how can businesses ensure they not only remain compliant, but address wider reaching consequences such as as fraud, tax evasion, health and safety breaches, immigration offences and reputational risk. On the 25 March 2021, we hosted an interactive webinar with our panel of subject matter experts to discuss:

What is modern slavery? An exploration of the different kinds of modern slavery, sector and geographic prevalence and how these play out in today’s workplace
Treatment of breaches
Employment issues associated with modern slavery
How are today’s businesses responding to public scrutiny? Do they understand the correlation between ethical workplaces and brand reputation?
Raising awareness of modern slavery issues – part of the fabric of your corporate culture or a compliance box ticking exercise?
Anticipated changes to the Modern Slavery Act. How can you prepare?
Furlough fraud: issues arising around exploitation of government job retention schemes relating to Covid-19