When you ask people, or you mention it to them, they say, "I've thought slavery
ended 100 years ago."
“And the reality is, it's worse today than it was five years ago, or ten years ago.”
And some people would suggest there may be more slaves in the world today than there has been at any point in time in human history. That was John Schultz, our guest for today's episode. That stat was quite horrifying. It's pretty heartbreaking, but there are people fighting back against this, which is where
John comes into the picture, because, Sam, today, we are going to be talking all about how technology is being used to try and combat modern slavery. I'm Michael Bird. I'm Sam Gerald. And welcome to Technology Now from HPE.
Modern slavery can be found all over the world across all sorts of industries and across all levels of the supply chain from child laborers right up to service workers who we might interact with at a restaurant.
“And the tech industry has to fight to keep on slavery out of its supply chain.”
And supply chains can be really opaque, so I can't imagine this is a particularly easy fight. Yeah, Sam, it very much is not, however, there are ways that people and organizations can try and help. We now have access to forms of data sharing and analysis, which didn't exist well
10 or 20 years ago.
And this data can be vital when it comes to spotting, tracking, and ultimately trying
to shut down instances of modern slavery, being able to link together information across countries and continents can help us to build a much clearer picture of the problem. Right, because it can be really difficult for anyone, no matter how well meaning or well intention they are, to actually make a difference if they don't know something is going on in the first place.
Exactly, and we need to link up data being connected across all points in a supply chain from organizations or governments all the way down to the people at the very start of the supply chain to get this overview and to be able to act quickly when new information becomes available. So to find out more about it, I spoke to John Schultz, Executive Vice President and Chief
Operating and Legal Officer for HPE who explained to me how bad this situation is and also how HPE are fighting back against modern slavery. But before we got into any of that, John started at the very beginning and explained to me just how people can end up as victims of modern slavery in the first place. Well, it's a complicated issue because you can find slavery in pretty much every country
in the world and probably almost every industry. But it is as painous as individuals who have been trafficked in, living in squalid conditions, working in dangerous situations and basically not being paid and their freedom is completely restricted, whether that's in mining or it's in fishing or even in the electronics industry. In other instances, it can be a little more subtle but nevertheless still an absolute human
rights violation, like someone who is offered a job and they leave Nepal to go to Malaysia and they have to pay a recruiter a fee for this job. Money they don't have and so when they get to Malaysia, they're working in very difficult conditions, their passport is taken, they're kind of almost indentured servitude and bondage to work off the recruitment fee, right?
And they are people who simply were looking for some opportunity to make some money and often send it back home where the opportunities are less. But presumably, modern slavery is becoming something that is happening less and less.
“I think most people presume it doesn't exist.”
You know, when you ask people or you mention it to them, they say I've thought slavery
ended 100 years ago and the reality is, it's worse today than it was five years ago or
ten years ago. And some people would suggest there may be more slaves in the world today than there has been at any point in time in human history. So this is definitely not a good news story. So is there an economic impact from what in base slavery?
Certainly the slave traders and the folks who engage in this believe they're making some kind of profit for themselves. But society as a whole is suffering. There is definitely data out there that shows that economies that have a significant amount of slavery and suffer as a result of it.
And then there's just the basic human cost. The idea that in 2026, we still have tens of millions of slaves in the world is just kind of beyond believe. So how bad is the current situation then?
Some estimates have the full number up into the 40, 50 million slaves worldwide and growing.
Just in the forced labor space, we think that number is larger than 25 million and likely
Under states.
The number?
And again, we tend to think of it when we hear it that, oh, this must be the poorest African
nation, so it must be these far-flung places in Asia. But we know there have been quite a few incidents in things like Nelson Lons in the US. I mean, that's how crazy this is. So how did it get to this point? What are the drivers for modern slavery?
There is one common factor and that's darkness. No one for the most part is pro-slavery. The reason it can exist is because it's hidden, often in plain view. And either that's because we don't have the data or we're just not looking. I like to say data is the best disinfectant if we can get smarter and we can shine the light.
We can get rid of slavery because it doesn't survive in the open. It only survives in darkness. And why is it increasing? Because presumably governments are aware of this, organizations are aware of this.
“Is it just because the world's population is increasing?”
I think the world's population is increasing. I think we're continuing to see dislocation and great example is if you take the current on the rest in Myanmar, that's dislocated large populations. It's not surprising then that you've seen these gigantic scam centers, right? You know, all the online scams.
Many of them are basically people who've been tricked to come to something which they
thought was a call center and all it is is basically a slave camp. I think also with technology, unfortunately, the folks who engage in this activity are getting more sophisticated, they can reach more people. So I think there's a lot of reasons why it's getting worse, but I think the thing that we're most focused on is how do we turn the tide because what we're doing today as much
as we're doing across a variety of communities, it's just not good enough. So the UN aimed to eradicate slavery by 2030, why has this not been successfully? There are a lot of really dedicated and well-intentioned people and we spend time with folks who've put 30 plus years into this fight and they have generated results in areas, right? But in some ways, you've got this disconnected effort and you can feel as though you're
doing good when, in fact, at the end of the day, you're not winning the war. And so what we've been focused on and he'll pack it enterprise is bringing people together to make everyone more effective through technology. We live in the age of insights as Antonio Lex to say, it's all about the data and if you have better insights, you can drive better outcomes.
And that's where our effort with the World Economic Forum launched a year ago to establish a global data partnership that is simply intended to take the people who are right now fighting slavery and make them more effective. I want to talk about the data partnership and a bit, but why is it so difficult to remove
“what is slavery from our supply chains in particular?”
If you think about what supply chains look like today in comparison to what they look like 20 or even 50 years ago, just take a basic server, the sure number of components, the number of suppliers involved, tracing all the way down to the minerals. It's almost impossible. We do the best we can, but it is hard to get full and to end visibility, especially because
in many instances, you may just have a scenario where even the company you're doing business with doesn't actually know that someone in their employment is actually leveraging slave labor. So let's talk about combating, wasn't slavery. I'll legislate his importance in the fight against one slave labor.
Absolutely. There are some good laws on the books in the US and the UK and elsewhere. There's the due diligence act. There are some good legislative actions. There probably can be more.
Enforcement is also a key.
“There are definitely jurisdictions where folks seem to tend to look the other way, either”
because they themselves are corrupt. There may be cultural issues and the like.
So legislation and government action is absolutely critical, but even that by itself will
not be enough. Because I suppose in this scenario, you're talking about where even the business owner doesn't know, then it's way more pervasive than you might think. It's way more pervasive and unfortunately in many instances it's profitable and until you take the money out of it, the behavior won't stop.
Hard to take the money out of it. So we think by getting concerted action across the folks who deal at the survivor level through the NGOs who provide a higher level support to the government and to companies. At the end of the day, what we can focus on in control is what I call the corporate economy, what is generated through the global supply chain.
And if that community could do a better job of finding these incidents of slavery and cutting it off than the money goes away. It sort of sounds like a multi-governmental international, multi-business collaboration to combat homelessness. I actually think that probably makes it sound more complicated than it is.
And it's very core. It's just about data sharing. So let me give you an example. We do a lot of work to try to figure out our supply chain, etc. We do audits.
But the truth of matter is, you can only audit so many places and so many times and the
Light.
The flip side is, you have workers on the ground, whether they're in a mind, whether they're in a lot of trunks factory or the light. If they're experienced and their information can move all the way up the chain, all of a sudden you can make connections that don't require so big collaborative agreement, etc. You just need the information chain.
So, assume for a moment someone has been extricated from slavery and they identified an address where they were held and the names of a couple of people that were involved. And we had the ability on RN to have all the names of the people we know are that are involved in our supply chain and every address that we have. If we can through AI, continue to monitor these data sources and we see, hey, this address
popped up, this name popped up. Now we don't have to rely on a blind audit.
We can say hold on a second, we should go to that site and we should talk to these people
right now. If you can now magnify that across the entire industry, across all of corporate world, where
“all of the supply chains are monitoring those, making that connection, right?”
That can be fed to government or government happens to see suspicious activity and it shows up in a government report. We see it in our AI agent boom, we're off to the races and vice versa. So AI can do all of that for us. You just need the data.
This is the global data partnership. This is global data partnership. So, can you just talk through that a bit more in detail? It's new. We launched it at Davos a year ago in partnership with the World Economic Forum, a team of
folks at Peel Packard Enterprise who have been working in this space, including my cohort and crying, and USSCO, we've gotten great support from folks in advisory and professional services, from the CTO's office and many other organizations. But we came to this conclusion having worked in this problem for a while that this information gap was critical.
“That little bit like what you see in companies, lots of activity, but it's not generating”
enough outcomes. And so the question was why, and what we concluded was, we needed better insights for everybody involved. You could work your own little piece of the problem and think you were doing a great job which you were, but you weren't actually solving the larger problem.
So the way the global data partnership works and we're doing a proof of concept in Thailand, with the Thai government, everybody contributes their data. Corporations like HPE, the government, migrant worker groups on the ground, we have the international organization for migrant workers, we have the labor union, we have folks who deal in supply chain due diligence, we've got a great set of partners and the idea
is, hey, keep your data, we don't need to aggregate it, keep it where it is. We don't even need to read the specific data so we don't have to violate your sort of personal sovereignty, but AI can allow us to extract insights and we can all use those insights to be better.
What's the most important thing that our organizations can do to combat modern slavery?
We've heard stories of folks who were in a business and saw something suspicious, didn't look right, reported, and it turned out, in fact, it was an instance of forced servitude.
“So I think we all need to look closer and that is part of our message, right?”
But again, I think this is an issue in which this is a ancient problem that persists today and is getting worse and we need new ideas and we think what we're doing is bringing some fresh ideas to it. Do you have any examples of where we have successfully combat the bonus slavery? Well, I certainly think that if you go back and look at the history of our supply chain work,
we've done a very good job of eradicating instances of forced labor. We've been a leader in the movement to make sure there's no recruiting fees and passports on take in and alike. That goes all the way back to the days when the regulations came in around conflict, minerals, for example.
We've once several awards for that. So I feel great about that, and I think that's an instance where we've made huge progress. Again, with supply chains getting more complex, more global, more fragment and distributed, we have to go further and we have to do more. We know of other instances.
It's been time with the head of the International Justice Mission. He's been doing this for 30 years. He can cite you examples where in combination with specific state and India over eight years, they were able to free 350,000 people from slavery through a combined effort. We know things work.
We just have to do more of it. It has to be more targeted because otherwise we don't have the resources to do it effectively. And again, there's so much money in it that we just got to be smarter about the way that we go about driving it to zero. Amazing. John, thank you so much for joining us on 10-0, which has been an absolute pleasure speaking to you.
My pleasure. Thank you very much.
Yeah, that was quite a powerful interview, I have to say.
My biggest takeaway was that clip that we had at the top of the show, which was Monteslavery's worth today than it's ever been. I watched a documentary recently about a guy who had his passport taken essentially.
He thought he was going for an engineering job in a foreign country and ended...
And essentially, they functioned sort of like call center and they had metrics and things that they would hit.
“It felt very, very corporatized, so it's crazy to think that there are more people who are enslaved today.”
It just looks different than what we're used to thinking of it as. I know we've done a project at HPE, where if you go into our CICs around the world, there was some photography from an amazing photographer who went to some of the different places where some of these materials to make our technology were taken. And it's basically slave labor, people mining various different minerals and metals. And you think, these competitors can't be from the last year or two years or three, as these must be decades old, but they're not, they're modern.
John said 40 to 50 million slaves as the prediction.
That is an absolutely staggering amount of people. And what I thought was interesting was the fact that it's hidden often in plain sight. But I suppose the positive was how we can use technology to combat it. I appreciated how transparent John was like, we're not claiming perfection over here either. He was saying that this stuff is actually quite hard even for the companies that do take it very, very seriously.
I was interested to learn and hear him speak about how there are different companies and organizations who are working really hard in like their one little area and feeling like they're making a big difference. But it doesn't move the needle or have the impact on the actual slavery system that seems to exist. And so it takes having a much more coordinated partnership than just sort of our individual efforts to stop all of the stuff. Yeah, he used the phrase, "Dater is the best disinfectant." We talk about good data, particularly as it relates to training A-on model, as I suppose it's the same here.
If John talks about darkness, didn't he? So, you know, bringing this to light through the global data partnership, which was making connections using AI based on various different data sources.
“I quite like the AI piece of it all because I think that obviously we work for a tech company and so we're familiar with some use cases for AI as a force for good.”
But I think sometimes it can get a bit controversial and there are things that AI really does quite well and that we can use to actually improve the lives of people. And this is a very, very clear, cut and dry case of it, right? Yeah, I would agree. This feels like a really noble and a good use of AI playing to its strengths. So Sam, I did want to leave this episode on somewhat more of a post tonight.
So one of the most important things I asked John was, "What can we, as in you and me and our listeners, do as every day people to combat modern slavery?"
Well, I'd say first thing is talk to people about it. There are still so many people that when you mention it, they look at you like, "What are you talking?" Right? So that has been a problem. But I think there's other things, right? Not just everyday people, but getting it up to the board level. So today, we're partnering with the Global Commissioner of Modern Slavery, that by a former UK Prime Minister Theresa May, and one of our objectives is to make sure that CEOs of companies and boards of directors are reviewing this issue on a regular basis.
We've done it with our own board and we are pressing forward to make sure that every other company in the world is taking this issue to their boards. You can learn a lot about what we're doing and how you can help, right? Get into the fight. That brings us to the end of technology now for this week. Thank you to our guest, John Schultz, and of course to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. If you've enjoyed this episode, please do let us know, rate and review us wherever you listen to episode.
“And if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to [email protected].”
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Technology now is hosted by Sam Jarrell and myself, Michael Bird. This episode was produced by Harry Lamputt and Izzy Clark, with production support from Alicia Kempson Taylor, Becky Bird, illissimetry, and Janessa Ish. Our theme music was composed by Greg Huper. Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy Ann Goldman, and Jacqueline Green. And our social media designers are Ella Hunter Garcia and Amber Maldonado.
Technology now is a fresh air production for Hula Packard Enterprise, and we'll see you at the same time, the same place next week. Cheers! Bye y'all! [Music]
