Hacker News Reader

Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to sounds cynical, but what is this really going to do besides signaling to investors how much they "care".

If the company was a mine, or some other business with a large on the ground operation in places where modern slavery is a thing, then I could see a statement like this holding water.

But you guys arent a mine, or a lumber factory, you provide online gambling services. I'm really struggling to see what they could possibly do one way or the other in terms of modern slavery besides the usual like auditing your vendors, but again, hard to imagine them having vendors that employ modern slavery given their market.

View on HN

As tech workers it's not always obvious that there's a wide range of people that any sufficiently large business will have contractual dealings with, be it cleaners, construction workers, painters and decorators, or retail staff. In low skilled labour jobs especially there is a risk of exploiting trafficked or enslaved workers unless due diligence is undertaken.

Statements like this are common on the websites of British companies. There are regulatory and reporting requirements related to the Modern Slavery Act 2015 [0] although I'm not sure of the precise details; something to do with auditing your supply chains maybe? As you've pointed out, it can be a bit farcical for companies in certain industries to make these kind of statements, but the law is what it is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Slavery_Act_2015

I also wondered what’s the connection between the online gambling industry and slavery so I Googled.

Here’s one article I found: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Cyber-slaver...

It's a requirement under UK law. They have retail operations (as stated in the disclosure) and a large number of suppliers in a wide variety of countries. I agree that they are fairly low risk on average but some of those vendors will be in high risk sectors.

Digital exploitation is real and often forgotten about.

I have a friend in Ghana who was offered - by a UK company who are a Google Cloud partner - £1/hour to do work for them as a junior DevOps engineer.

Yes, £1/hour. Before he had to pay taxes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com