Rio De Janeiro -
Thousands of people are victims of forced labour and inhumane
work conditions in Brazil's booming meat and poultry industries,
with some forced to work 20-hour days, researchers said on
Thursday.
Slave labour in Brazil's poultry sector is "endemic", said
the report by the Washington-based Institute for Agriculture and
Trade Policy (IATP) that called for improved working conditions,
enforced labour rights and implementation of work contracts.
Brazil is the world's largest exporter of poultry.
Under Brazilian law, forced labour is defined as a form of
modern-day slavery that includes debt bondage, degrading work
conditions and long hours that pose a risk to workers' health or
life and violate their dignity.
In its poultry industry, teams of about 10 labourers known
as chicken catchers collect the birds that are crammed onto
large farms, working up to 20 hours and catching more than
50 000 chickens a day, the report said.
The back-breaking work of chicken catching is considered
dirty and dangerous, as poultry can peck, claw and defecate as
it is trapped.
"Workers tasked with catching these chickens and
transporting them from farms to slaughterhouses suffer egregious
working conditions," said the report by IATP, Berlin-based
Heinrich Boll Foundation and Brazilian rights group FASE.
Dozens of companies, including Brazil's JBS SA, a global
meatpacking company, signed onto a 2007 National Pact for the
Eradication of Slave Labor, part of an effort to rid supply
chains of slavery.
In response to the report, JBS, the world's biggest meat
producer, said the company and its suppliers "repudiate" any use
of slave labour.
".. all contracts signed by JBS have a specific clause that
explicitly prohibits practices that may establish the use of
labour analogous to slave and child labour," the company said in
an emailed statement to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Brazil's BRF, one of the world's largest poultry
exporters, said in an emailed statement on Friday that it "does
not tolerate and strongly condemns all forms of work in
degrading conditions and incompatible with human dignity, such
as exhausting working days, forced labor and debt bondage."
It said it had a supplier monitoring program to ensure
compliance with labor laws.
BRF said it has been working to improve working conditions
of chicken catchers through a program launched in 2015 called
"Apanha Legal" ("Legal and Humane Catching"). It also said it
was a signatory to the United Nations' Sustainable Development
Goals that promote decent work conditions and seek eradication
of forced labour and a member of the National Institute for
Eradication of Slave Labor (Inpacto).
More than 160 000 people are believed to be trapped in
modern slavery in Brazil that includes forced labour, according
to the Walk Free Foundation, a rights group.
In the past decade, numerous reports by local campaigners
have put the spotlight on slave labour in Brazil's meat and
cattle industry, revealing a complex web of suppliers across the
globe.
Many cases involve forced labour on cattle ranches across
Brazil's remote and jungle areas.
Last year, raids carried out by government labour inspectors
identified 885 labourers in slave-like conditions, with more
than half found in agriculture and cattle ranching, down from
1 509 in 2014.
*Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson
Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights,
trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience.
Visit http://news.trust.org