How was Issara Institute founded and what is the motivation behind focusing on human trafficking and forced labor?
I founded Issara Institute in 2014 when slavery in Thai seafood and at sea were being uncovered and reported on by the international press. Around 2012, while working on the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking, one of our projects was running a multi-lingual migrant worker hotline in Thailand, to run in parallel with the Thai government anti-trafficking hotline which was less trusted by foreign workers. When U.S. seafood buyers were confronted with evidence of slavery in their supply chains that their audits did not catch, they turned to us for insights. Essentially, it became clear what has been widely documented since then: that audits are often not detecting forced labor for a number of different reasons, not least of which is that they are often business-controlled, not truly independent, and do not safeguard at-risk workers from retaliation. Thus, these audits were not trusted by workers, whereas our hotline was.

Not long after, we decided to come out of the UN and become an independently run hotline and NGO so that we could partner with businesses according to ethical partnership terms and conditions set by us, and expand worker voice-driven remediation and systems change. Since many of the retailers buying seafood from Thailand also buy other products from Thailand, such as apparel and footwear but also electronics, agricultural products, and household goods, within a couple years we were working across the extended supply chains of many industries in Southeast Asia.

How has Issara Institute evolved since its inception in 2014, especially in terms of addressing working condition issues and recruitment-related challenges in the garment and textiles industry?
Issara has evolved as the situation has evolved. A decade ago, labor recruitment in Thailand was largely informal and weakly regulated. Undocumented and forced labor was common, even in higher-profile industries including apparel and footwear where we struggled with undisclosed subcontractors hiring undocumented labor, and piecework with exploitative targets and incentives that drove overwork and underpay. Legal recruitment channels were expensive and rarely used. Informal brokers ran rampant and were walking around factories and worksites in some provinces freely. They controlled dormitories and worker movements. They had guns, sold drugs, and manufactured counterfeit documents at the same time as managing migrants - not all, but this was not hard for NGOs to find. 

For suppliers, recruitment was essentially free due to the high supply of workers from poorer neighboring countries like Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Jobs were given to the highest-bidding migrants, with no formal agreements between suppliers and recruiters. Workers had to pay for their jobs, leading many into debt.

How are things different now in 2024? 
They have definitely changed for the better from the perspective of long-term trends. Worker voice, evidence-driven policy advocacy, investigative journalism, and corporate partnership alternatives to audits and certifications have all helped. Many more Thai suppliers selling to the U.S. and Europe have proper employment contracts with all their workers, invest in ensuring that workers are documented, and have service agreements with recruiters.

These more formal contracts with recruiters have reduced space for informal brokers that used to carry out a host of illicit activities within these supply chains.  Our various worker voice and ethical recruitment programs still focus on addressing serious labor- and recruitment-related issues, but we’ve also been able to deepen our work around preventative measures and working with various business actors toward systems strengthening to prevent issues from arising in the first place.

We’re now able to work with suppliers on drafting ethical and fair service agreements with their recruitment agencies to minimize exploitation risk throughout recruitment processes. This type of work would not have been possible 10 years ago.  We’ve also strengthened our presence in the region, the industries in which we work and our partnerships with actors across the supply chain ecosystem, including partnerships with nearly 2 dozen other local NGOs and trade unions to develop a truly empowered worker voice system spanning origin and destination countries that foreign migrant workers know and trust. Collectively, we work across Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan as destination countries, for Bangladeshi, Burmese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Lao, Nepali, and Thai workers. And the network is growing. 

In which areas is there still a lot to be done to achieve truly ethical supply chains, especially in the garment and textiles sector? 
Responsible recruitment where no worker pays for their job. This has been a trendy topic in global circles over the past decade, especially in the apparel and footwear where a spate of investigations and exposés have connected the industry to forced labor linked to recruitment processes, deception, and debt bondage. But there’s still a lot of distance between the talk and action, and apparel companies and other global actors must better uplift NGOs on the ground like us and our partners who are actually working on and confronting exploitative recruitment every day to truly confront these issues head on. Employer Pays policies alone cannot solve recruitment-related exploitation.

We’re also still struggling with achieving workplaces free of physical abuse and serious mental abuses. Yes, we still confront and work to remediate physical abuse of migrant workers by line supervisors and others abusing their power in the workplace - check the Inclusive Labor Monitoring Community Dashboard at www.workervoices.org and see for yourself how physical abuse has been in the top five or six worker-reported labor abuses in Thailand every year for the past five years. Actually, www.workervoices.org is a great place to see the top 10 worker-reported labor abuses, and you can toggle by date, industry, and country.  When you look at manufacturing specifically, which includes apparel and footwear, just in the past two years you can see that the top 10 worker-reported labor issues includes issues around mental and physical abuse, as well as unfair dismissals, unresponsive grievance mechanisms, and workers not being provided with legal documents.

What’s promising is seeing that the remediation quality for these issues has improved from five years ago to the last year. Workervoices.org shows the quality of remediation by the supplier/employer of issues, as validated by workers and NGOs. Take the example of physical and/or other serious abuse by a line supervisor or management in manufacturing. The average remediation quality over the last five years for this issue was just above fair (2.54/4), but when you look at just the last year the remediation quality jumps to excellent (3.91/4). The apparel and footwear industry is a big part of why remediation quality has increased, which you can see via our industry comparative analysis to worker voice. Apparel and footwear have the highest quality average industry scores on remediation quality and openness to reform, though conversely the industry has the lowest average score when it comes to timeliness of remediation. 

We hope that corporate and non-corporate partners alike realize that while audits are not sufficient for establishing and maintaining the ongoing, meaningful engagement with workers that is required for human rights due diligence (HRDD), this aspiration is still achievable because it is absolutely possible to directly connect to worker voice in an ongoing manner and at scale in this way, to get this very important perspective of the ever-changing human rights realities in their supply chain. 

What are the main objectives of the Issara Institute and how do you intend to achieve them, also with regard to the garment and textiles sector in Asia?
Issara Institute's goal is to eliminate labor exploitation, including forced labor and human trafficking, within global supply chains, starting with those connected to Asia. All of our programs are rooted in worker voice and aim to empower workers, creating safe spaces for workers to raise their voices authentically, and then working with partners across the supply chain ecosystem to respond directly to workers’ experiences and create positive, lasting impact. Practically speaking, this means we leverage our labor, tech, and data expertise and position on the ground at origin and destination countries so that employers, buyers, recruitment agencies, business associations, government, and civil society organizations understand and better respond to the real-time issues being faced by workers.

So much apparel and footwear production occurs in Asia, and the industry is integral to the work we do. As with other sectors, our objectives in the apparel industry are to connect with, support, and empower workers not only at their workplaces, but also throughout their recruitment experiences going down to the first mile in workers’ home countries or regions.

How has Issara Institute adapted its strategies to address the unique challenges faced by migrant workers from different regions?
Partnerships have been integral to Issara developing means to build empowered worker voice systems in and across  regions. Our priority is not to try and expand Issara everywhere but rather to link up with and support existing great, trusted, locally based organizations supporting workers. We have seen many times over the years how easy it is for big donor-funded projects or contractors to supplant rather than support local civil society, and this top-down, parachuting- in programming weakens local civil society in a way that we all should be talking about more.

It’s not just a labor problem; it’s a more fundamental challenge to good governance and rule of law, two key ingredients for vibrant and just societies. This is why we collaborate with over 20 other local NGOs and trade unions across Asia, and are beginning to reach into the Gulf States and Europe. Locally based organizations know best how to address the unique challenges of workers based on their nationality, gender, industry, and local legal and policy frameworks. 

Issara Institute is described as a worker voice organization. How does the institute ensure that workers have a platform to voice their concerns and grievances especially in the garment and textiles sector?
We provide options so that workers can contact us through means with which they feel most comfortable, meaning we offer a number of high-tech and low-tech options for workers to connect with us. Thus, we run democratized worker voice channels - everyone is welcome, every worker gets to speak for themselves, all calls are actioned and valued the same, and workers are not electing someone to represent them or having to speak through a representative.  We know there is some debate about this, whether true worker voice systems need to have systems of election and representation. But where we work, labor is mobile, the risks of exploitation begin at the village level well before workers step foot in their workplace, and there is a lot of churn. So there are a lot of reasons why the network of service providers - including local trade unions - support the need for safeguarded, democratized worker voice for migrant workers throughout their journey.

Our work includes empowerment events and dissemination of posters, t-shirts, flyers, Facebook Live Streams, etc. Jobseekers, workers, and their families can contact us anytime on our 24/7 free multilingual helpline, different multilingual social media channels, and our own Yelp-like smartphone app, Golden Dreams, which provides job seekers with information about their rights, transparent and ethical job opportunities through the job marketplace features, as well as the option to rate and review employers, recruiters, and service providers. This means we’re connecting with workers and jobseekers across a variety of nationalities and industries, including apparel and footwear, and we periodically conduct in-person outreach and events in areas with significant apparel production to ensure we capture that industry.  

Our Networks’ worker voice channels typically receive between 10,000-15,000 messages and calls each month, sometimes as high as over 20,000 - which, to our understanding, makes it one of the largest independent, ongoing worker voice systems in the world.  But it’s not just about the reach, it’s also about the impact: together and with our business partners we have helped to remediate worker-reported labor abuses for nearly 125,000 workers over the past two years, which makes ours one of the most effective and impactful worker voice systems in the world.

How does Issara Institute plan to strengthen its relationships with NGOs and trade unions and what benefits do you expect from such collaborations?
In short, we plan to strengthen our network of NGO partners by growing the ILM Action Network! As I previously mentioned, a big piece of how we build relationships with CSO partners is through the shared use of the ILM case management system. But there are other ways that we work with one another on an ongoing basis, whether it’s providing technical guidance, conducting joint outreach or missions trips, collaborating on case management, or organizing multi-stakeholder convenings. This work gives us the benefit of a shared language when looking at worker experiences and concerns across regions and industries (since we all use the ILM and thus organize data in the same way), and it allows us to have joint efforts in pursuit of our common mission of providing better outcomes for workers. 

What are the plans for Issara Institute, both in terms of strengthening the organization itself and expanding?
We would love to see civil society networks and credible, empowered worker voice be more widely embraced as vital to corporate human rights due diligence. It is an uphill battle to build the business case for ethical corporate behavior, and we want to move towards a world where ethics become an integral part of business practices. And critically, this will mean moving towards a bottom-up approach for HRDD and truly centering rights-holders and local organizations who are best positioned to identify key challenges and propose solutions.   

NGOs and other organizations struggle to justify zero-fee ethical recruitment, which ensures that low-skilled workers aren't charged for their jobs in global markets. Consider the costs of flying workers overseas, including fees from informal brokers. Many are reluctant to bear these expenses, which encompass both legitimate and illegitimate costs. Where will the innovative solutions come from? Who will identify and report informal and illicit actors? Who will establish broker-free connections between job seekers and legitimate employers, reducing recruitment costs? Advocacy to level the playing field in producing countries is essential. Audits and certifications often fall short in addressing these complex issues. Recent media investigations and academic research support this, echoing worker concerns. The potential for creative, locally owned, and sustainable solutions lies within local civil society, emphasizing the need for collaboration.

Dr Lisa Rende Taylor, Founder & Executive Director of the Issara Institute, has worked in the field of anti-human trafficking for over 20 years, the last 10 focused on forced labor and human trafficking in global supply chains. After serving in the U.S. State Department, Asia Foundation, ILO, and UN, she founded Issara Institute in 2014 to create a home for innovation, inclusion, and impact in anti-trafficking.