‘I feel in our hearts, that we represent the people’: Cleaning company boss calls for modern slavery laws in New Zealand

Sunday, 25 May 2025

Modern slavery remains a stain and a taint on New Zealanders’ lives, largely linked to products like food, electronics and clothing that have exploited workers buried deep in global supply chains.

Businessman and Australasian managing director of global facilities giant OCS Group, Gareth Marriott, put it plainly this week: “It’s as simple as this; New Zealand needs to get legislation.”

Marriott was speaking at a modern slavery forum held by Eco Choice Aotearoa in Auckland, attended by veteran Labour politician Damien O’Connor.

But Marriott’s plea for New Zealand to follow Australia, the European Union and Britain by implementing modern slavery laws, putting duties on big companies to identify and eradicate the taint of slavery from their supply chains, was not heard by the Government, as it did not send an MP to the forum.

It is not that National politicians don’t care about worker exploitation, slavery and human trafficking.

National MP Greg Fleming has a bill being debated aimed at lifting the penalty for human trafficking, though anti-slavery campaigners say the laws it seeks to bolster are so flawed they are a practical bar to prosecutions. And Parliament recently passed a law to outlaw wage theft.

Marriott drew attention to Australia having leap-frogged New Zealand with modern slavery laws designed to force large companies to understand and report on the slavery risks in their often very long supply chains.

“Modern slavery’s really close to our heart for all our people, and bottom line is that we employ in excess of 5000 people across Australia and New Zealand,” Marriott said.

The Human Rights Commission says New Zealand's current work visa scheme may be facilitating human trafficking and modern slavery

“A lot of them are minimum wage or living wage employees, in particular New Zealand. Therefore, I feel in our hearts, that we represent the people.”

But he pointed to a World Vision report last year indicating as many as 8000 people were victims of modern slavery in New Zealand.

“I don’t enjoy working in a community where 8000 people were short-changed, their life changed,” Marriott said.

The commercial cleaning industry is considered one of the domestic sectors with the highest risk of modern slavery, a term that covers a wide range of exploitation running from bonded labour and people forced to work on pain of punishment, to working conditions so awful, so dangerous, so exploitative that they break even the lax laws of the country in which the work is being done.

The incidence of modern slavery in New Zealand is far less than in global supply chains on which Kiwi importers rely.

It has been estimated that New Zealand businesses in sectors like retail and construction, and households, through buying on the likes of Temu and Amazon, are importing as much as $8 billion worth of goods tainted by modern slavery each year.

However, both hosting modern slavery and buying in goods made with the help of the practice are risks that in recent months have garnered headlines. There are concerns, for example, that New Zealand’s current work visa scheme may be facilitating human trafficking.

These concerns centre on some big names like Zespri, which is working with the Labour Inspectorate on labour abuse on kiwifruit orchards, Watties, which stopped sourcing tomatoes from China in late 2023 over Uyghur forced labour fears, and Woolworths, which found “debt bondage” in its enormous supply chain in Malaysia in 2023.

There was frustration voiced at the Auckland forum at the length of time it was taking for New Zealand’s politicians to pass modern slavery laws, though Labour got close before being voted out of power.

Commodities like cocoa, sugar and rice, and minerals mined in places like the Congo all carry high risks of forced and child labour in their production.

“We’ve been talking about this for so long,” said Gemma Livingston, legal adviser at DLA Piper.

Livingston recalled being in a board room in Australia in 2016 when that country was consulting on introducing modern slavery laws.

“The world was looking at this issue, and New Zealand was up there, and I was like, ‘yeah, of course we are because we’re so much better than Australia’.”

And yet, she said: “They've implemented the modern slavery legislation. They've had three years of reporting. They've had a review. They've had government commentary back on that review.”

And New Zealand still did not have modern slavery legislation, or effective human trafficking legislation, the former criminal prosecutor said.

“In the last 20 years it's four, maybe five, trafficking prosecutions have occurred. It's not because trafficking is not happening in New Zealand.

Australia passed laws to make its biggest companies work to identify and report on slavery risks in their supply chains, leaping ahead of New Zealand on this emotive consicence issue.

“But we cannot prosecute it because of the way the legislation is written,” Livingston said.

“Now it's becoming a little bit of a joke of how far New Zealand is behind,” she said.

So frustrated were civil society groups in New Zealand that last year they drafted a bill to try and encourage New Zealand politicians to act, but so far they have not.

There were hopes that Labour would soon enter a bill into the members’ ballot system, but that would have to rely on luck to be pulled out.

Labour MP Damien O’Connor says New Zealand should be sending the signal to its trading partners that it does not endorse modern slavery.

O’Connor said New Zealand was currently turning a “blind eye” to modern slavery.

“I'm not sure that there's cross-party support at the moment to progress modern slavery legislation at home,” he said. “I think you'll find some blockages, if the legislation comes onto the table of the house.

“We're a country that absolutely relies on trade for our existence.

Woolworths is considered by modern slavery experts to be one of the more progressive companies when it comes to trying to eradicate modern slavery from its supply chain.

“We want to ensure that we're not endorsing modern slavery anywhere in the world by buying products,” he said.

Not having modern slavery legislation had not so far exposed New Zealand, O’Connor said.

But he said the global direction of travel remained clear.

“Our opportunity as a country is to be ahead of the curve, and I think we can do it,” he said.

Modern slavery reporting is becoming much more common for New Zealand companies, partly because of the effect of Australia’s legislation and partly because of demands from European Union trading partners and British supermarket chains.

Some of the largest companies in New Zealand are caught by Australia’s modern slavery reporting laws, either because they are Australian-owned, like Woolworths and the big four banks, or because they do a lot of business in Australia, like Fonterra.