SG | Modern Slavery: Phone and Fashion Slaves

Trace minerals for ICT hardware and the garment/textile industry. Consider your clothes and  special metals essential in your phone and  laptop. What do we know about the human impact of the production processes keeping us online and clothed?

Eelco Fortuijn dives into the human costs deep in your phone. He shares research insights revealing practices, dynamics and supply mechanisms [in]visibly embedded within supply chains for metals in electronics. Pauline Overeem presents research on textile and garment industry and gives insights into corporate policies and practices that lead to the systemic violation of the rights of workers based on years of experience within organizations that work towards improving corporate accountability in fashion.

About Eelco Fortuijn

Since late 2016, Eelco has been The Netherlands’ Representative for ElectronicsWatch.org. Electronics Watch is an independent monitoring organisation that assists public sector buyers to meet their responsibility to protect the labour rights of workers in their global electronics supply chains more effectively and less expensively than any single public sector buyer could accomplish on its own.  Between late 2013 and mid 2015 Eelco was Director of Policy & Advocacy for Fairfood International, the organization that he founded in 2002 and of which he was also director until the end of 2007. Until 2002 and in 2008 and 2009 he worked as a consultant in the area of ​​sustainability, development economics, management science and organizational psychology. Between 2010 and 2013 he was director of GoedeWaar.nl, the Dutch sustainable consumer organization. He was born in 1970 in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), where he did an MBA at the Erasmus University specializing in sustainability, development economics and organizational psychology.

About Pauline Overeem

Pauline Overeem is senior researcher at The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO). This organisation is a critical, independent, not-for-profit knowledge centre on multinationals. Since 1973 SOMO has investigated multinational corporations and the impact of their activities on people and the environment providing custom-made services (research, consulting and training) to non-profit organisations and the public sector.  Pauline has worked extensively on human rights, corporate accountability and development issues, in various organisations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Oxfam Novib and the India Committee of the Netherlands. She specialises in accountability in supply chains. She has research experience in the electronics and textiles and garments sectors in Asia. Pauline studied Contemporary Asian History and holds a Master’s degree in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam.