COMBATING FORCED LABOUR IN BRAZIL

BRA/01/50/USA

BACKGROUND

There are many types of forced labour practices in Brazil. The ILO office in Brazil has decided to use the term “slave labour” instead of “forced labour” and justify it through the following definition: every type of forced labour is degrading, but the reverse is not always true. The variable that makes one concept different from the other is freedom. When we speak of slave labour we refer to a crime that restricts the freedom of workers. This apprehension of liberty is carried out in four ways: retention of documents, the presence of armed supervisors or “gatos” who threaten lives, through debt bondage or due to the remote geographical location from which escape is not possible.

All slavery practices in Brazil are illegal, but hard to combat because of the country’s dimension, accessibility challenges, poor communication, inspection limitations, as well as legal and institutional matters.

In recognition of Brazilian efforts and as a means of securing Conventions n º 29 and 105 and the ILO declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, the ILO and the Brazilian Government initiated in 2002, the Technical Cooperation Project entitled Combating Forced Labour in Brazil.

PROJECT APPROACH

The Project aims to strengthen and coordinate actions of national institutional partners and fight for human rights, mainly through the National Commission for the Eradication of Forced Labour. The Project also foresees the rehabilitation of rescued workers to prevent them from falling-back into forced labour.

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

The Project comprises six activities to be developed by its partners:

The creation of a database capable of compromising information and providing a more precise diagnose of Brazilian reality;

National Campaign to raise public awareness, mobilize society and prevent the occurrence and reinsertion of slave labour among rural workers;

National workplan to combat force labour;

The Training of partners to enhance effectiveness of actions and to strengthen national agencies;

Institutional building of Mobile Labour Inspections Units of the Ministry of Labour by donating equipment and transferring resources in order to facilitate the inspection teams’ transportation to remote places;

Implementation of two pilot action programmes to prevent and provide assistance, as well as promote income generation for rescued workers and their families.

GOALS, RESULTS AND IMPACTS

The Project donated to the Ministry of Labour a database, initiated in April 2002, on forced labour in order to provide a better means of diagnosis and information of the problem in the country. The database is now able to identify the regions of incidence, recruitment, names of those responsible of the crime, all economic activities involved, the reoccurrence of forced labour cases and of workers

The Project partially sponsored two Workshops of Legislation Improvement on Forced Labour, which resulted in the elaboration of legal proposals to increase effectiveness in the fight against forced labour. Many suggestions brought up during these Workshops turned into draft laws currenltly under discussion in the National Congress. The Labour Supreme Court – TST created an Itinerant Labour Court to judge forced labour crimes in remote areas. All these legal aspects generated an intensive debate over the responsibility of Federal Justice and Labour Justice to judge forced labour crimes. In the international sphere, the final document of the I workshop was included as part of the national response to the Inter-American Human Rights Court – CIDH of the Organization of American States – OAS/OEA.

In September 2002, the Project organized the 1st Round of Debates on Slave Labour. The seminar had approximately 350 participants, including federal judges, federal prosecutors, labour prosecutors, police officers, road patrol officers and labour inspectors. The main objective was to discuss the role of member institution, as well as to present the international and national aspects of the forced labour problem. The event fostered the creation of working groups against forced labor in the Public Federal Ministry, Public Ministry of Labour, and the Brazilian Bar Association –OAB, besides receiving intense media coverage. On November 23 and 24, 2004 the 2nd Round of Debates was held with the participation of more than 400 people. During the event, many relevant themes on the fight against forced labour were deeply discussed and the challenges that still thwart the achievement of certain goals aimed at the eradication of this problem in Brazil were pointed out.

In following through with the discussions initiated in 2002 within the ambit of the Special Commission of the CDDPH, the National Plan to Eradicate Forced Labour in Brazil was launched by President Lula on March 11th 2003. The Plan was a product of the inspirations of all the institutions which would later become part of the National Commission for the Eradication of Forced Labour (CONATRAE), finally founded on august 1st, 2003. The Plan – the elaboration of which the Project actively participated – contains 72 short, medium and long term objectives to guide all activities during a period of four years.

Some of the Project’s main activities occurred within the communications sphere. Numerous seminars directed specifically at journalists in Brasília and São Paulo, were held. As a direct result of these activities and of greater media coverage, between 2002 and 2003, the number of news reports on the subject increased by 1,900%. The National Campaign was launched on October 22nd 2003 in the House of Representatives. Coordinated by the ILO, the campaign was conceptualized, created, produced and articulated entirely voluntarily by many publicity agencies and communications means all over the country, totalizing a sum of US$ 7,000,000.00 donated to the cause in the form of gratuitous exposure.

Accordingly, the Project seeks to promote integrated actions among all national institutions that defend human rights and support efforts of communication between governmental and non-governmental agencies at federal, state and municipal level. The Project stimulates debate over the problem in the States where the incidence of recruitment or of forced labour cases is high. In addition to the state of Pará, state Plans have already been launched in Maranhão and Piauí. The Project also promotes the process of social dialogue between organizations of workers and employers. Fittingly, the ILO’s cooperation has assigned more weight to the efforts of increasing penalty execution on land owners who resort to forced labour with imprisonment, fines and even the expropriation of land.

The Project supported the Federal Government’s brave initiative of launching on November 18th 2003, the famous “dirty list”, which contained the names of 52 companies and which from that moment on were prohibited of receiving constitutional resources for the financing of their enterprises. The second “dirty” list containing 49 additional names, was disclosed on July 26th, 2004, and reinforced the government’s position in the fight against criminals that use human resources in conditions analogous to slavery. In January 2005, a third dirty list was released containing the names of other 65 transgressors.

In face of such a great change in posture and due to a more committed, articulate set of actions, numerous arrests have started to take place. More temporary detainments have been enacted in 2003 than all other years put together – 36 prison sentences, 27 carried out. Last year, Brazil reached a record in the number of rescued workers with the release of more than 5 thousand people by the Mobile Inspection Group. There were a total of 10,776 workers rescued from 1995 to 2003. During hte years of 2003 and 2004 7,169 workers were rescued.

In continuing the efforts to strengthen the repressive action carried out by the institutions responsible for inspection, the ILO donated approximately US$ 40,000 in equipments (laptops, portable printers, digital cameras, and walkie-talkies) on June 26th, 2004, to the mobile inspection group. It is worth mentioning that in unison with these efforts carried out by the project, the Federal Government tripled the budgetary resources available to the inspection group in 2004.

Within this context, the penal actions taken against labour criminals are starting to show results. Approximately US$ 3,200,000 have been accounted for in fines, which is a huge improvement in comparison to past indemnifications. Furthermore, many penal and labour trials are under way; indicating that the period of impunity may be coming to an end.

One of the most important advances for the fight against forced labour was the public commitment signed by various steel companies that operate in the region of Carajás, in Pará, to stop buying vegetable coal from companies that have verifiably used forced/slave labour. The agreement was signed on August 13, 2004 and witnessed by the ILO, the High Court of Labour, and the Public Ministry of Labour. The agreement was mediated by Ethos Institute, a permanent partner in ILO’s mission in Brazil. This was the first step towards the involvement of the private sector, much sought after by the ILO and the Ethos Institute, to make sure that social responsibility is given a stronger voice against human rights crimes in all companies.

The active participation by partners and society’s response to media coverage on slave labour is an indication that we are moving in the right direction, and that a lot of what needed to be done has been treated with the adequate responsibility and indignation that the subject deserves.