How rife is modern slavery in NZ? Exploitation is growing but hard to prove, MPs are told
Friday, 12 June 2026
ANALYSIS: “The oldest man we rescued from forced labour inside a factory in India was 75. He had been enslaved his entire life over a debt he inherited as a child, the equivalent of less than 20 New Zealand dollars,” anti-slavery operative Gary Shaw told MPs recently.
“That factory supplied international markets, including New Zealand,” said Shaw, a former policeman who has spent the last 20 years in perilous operations overseas, including rescuing children from brothels frequented by paedophiles.
MPs on the Employment and Workforce Select Committee heard from Shaw during hearings held into the Modern Slavery Bill.
The bill is the combined effort of Labour’s Camilla Belich and National’s Greg Fleming to catch this country up to jurisdictions like Australia, the UK, Canada and the European Union, which have all have modern slavery reporting laws.
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Typically, these laws are focused on requiring larger companies, including major retailers, to report on their efforts to manage the risks of modern slavery in their supply chains.
They are a modern attempt to end slavery, which persists in factories, farms, plantations and ships, secreted in long global supply chains that feed consumer demand in countries, including New Zealand.
However, MPs were told by many submitters the bill, in its current form, it would fail to reduce modern slavery, or ensure exploited workers are compensated, if it passed into law.
“The Abuse and Care Royal Commission taught us that catastrophic harm can remain hidden for decades within trusted institutions, often in plain sight. It showed that systems can become highly effective at managing information while remaining incapable of recognising suffering,” Shaw said.
“Reporting and risk frameworks alone will not help organisations see clearly across complex global supply chains. In many cases, they simply formalise the same blindness.”
MPs were told by activists, including World Vision, the focus of the bill should be on creating positive duties not only to take reasonable steps to identify risk and incidences of modern slavery, but to ensure exploited workers are compensated, and are no longer subject to abuse.
This is known as the “due diligence” approach.
However, people battling against forms of coerced and “bonded” labour in New Zealand told MPs the bill would do nothing in its current form to reduce modern slavery taking place on New Zealand farms and orchards, in convenience stores, beauty and massage parlours, and on construction sites.
How rife is modern slavery in New Zealand?
Modern slavery is an umbrella term for severe exploitation where people are exploited through threats, violence, or deception, and includes forced labour and debt bondage.
Belich and Fleming’s bill covers slavery as it defined under the Crimes Act, but also debt-bondage or serfdom, forced or exploitative labour, servitude, and sexual exploitation.
There are estimates for the value of goods and services sold in this country that have been produced at least in part by people trapped into forms of modern slavery overseas.
World Vision estimates New Zealand households spend around $77-a-week on goods “likely made through child labour and forced labour” with the riskiest items being electronics, clothing, shoes, toys, furniture, coffee, and bananas.
If correct, that would add up to around $8 billion in imports each year.
MPs were told New Zealand was importing modern slavery in the form of migrant workers “bonded” to exploitative employers through visas that did not permit them to work for anyone else, unless they could prove their were being abused.
Dhilum Nightingale, from Community Law Wellington and Hutt Valley, said complaints from exploited migrant workers to the Labour Inspectorate rose from 800-a-year three years ago to more than 2400.
“We know that that is just a fraction of what is actually happening out there. Nobody knows the true statistics as there are significant under-reporting.”
Proving exploitation was hard as workers were afraid of being deported, and in some cases, even feared thugs would be sent to threaten the safety of their families back in their home countries, if they alerted authorities.
Gwyneth Carey-Smith, from Citizens Advice Bureau, said over a two-year period, their volunteers had responded to about 1000 of these inquiries.
“When New Zealanders hear the term modern slavery, they probably think about something that happens elsewhere, not here in Aotearoa. Unfortunately modern slavery is happening on our shores. It has been for some time, and it’s not just a few outlier cases. It’s a systemic problem,” she said.
What modern slavery looks like in NZ
Nightingale gave an example from the community law centres’ work.
A migrant worker on an accredited employer work visa was working in a convenience store in a small rural town. They paid a premium offshore to secure that job. This was money borrowed from family back home, and money that they were counting on being able to repay once they were earning New Zealand wages.
“When they arrived, the reality was nothing like what they had been promised. The roster said 35 hours a week. They were working at 90 hours from 8:00 am to 9 pm, seven days,” Nightingale said.
“Every week they were required to go to a local ATM and take out $300 in cash and give it back to their employer. The time sheets were false and the underpayment was severe and systematic.
“They wanted to leave, but they couldn't. The visa was tied to the employer. They were in debt from the premium they had paid, and they had no realistic way to repay what they owed if they walked out.
“This is not someone being held in chains, but it is someone who is completely trapped, and that is modern slavery.
“What did people see around them? Well, a bread delivery driver came to that store most evenings. A milk delivery driver came most mornings, and fruit and veggie suppliers dropped off stock regularly. They saw the same person there every single time they came, early morning till evening, 7 days a week.”
Uncomfortable cases at the Employment Relations Authority
Sometimes cases of migrant worker exploitation are investigated, and claims can come before the Employment Relations Authority with some disturbing characteristics, including employers abusing the vias system to bring vulnerable workers to New Zealand to exploit, and those can touch some of the largest companies in the country.
Usually, labour exploitation claims in relation to supermarkets are to do with their supply chains, especially with higher-risk commodities like rice, fish and sugar.
But late last year, the owner of a FourSquare under the Foodstuffs North Island cooperative was found to have charged two migrant workers “premiums” to help them get work visas, and then worked them for long hours for below the minimum wage.
The case involved falsified employment records, and two workers sometimes working on seven days a week.
Foodstuff’s rival Woolworths reported last year that it had identified labour exploitation in its supply chain both outside of New Zealand, and within, with some trolley collectors being exploited by contractors to its supermarkets.
Foodstuffs took action, and so did Woolworths, which took steps to make sure the trolley collectors were paid compensation.
And action is necessary, because Nightingale told MPs: “Exploitation starts as visa dependency, immigration coercion, excessive hours, underpayment, and it escalates from there. If we wait until it looks like modern slavery, we have waited too long.”
The $100 million clause
Like modern slavery reporting laws in Australia, Canada, the UK and European Union, the bill before New Zealand’s Parliament would only have companies, or consolidated groups of companies, required to publish an annual slavery statement about their efforts to root out slavery in their supply chains, if they have annual revenue of more than $100m.
Dennis Parker, chief executive of Trade Aid Imports, said the proposed limit would cover just 263 massive companies, but leave importers of some of the most at-risk products not having to report.
Trade Aid wanted the revenue limit dropped to $20m, though that is unlikely to happen as medium-sized businesses are not able to cope with sudden large increases in costs.
Phil Cumming, general manager for sustainability and ethical sourcing at The Warehouse, called for big importers like Temu and Shein to also be included.
“Modern slavery is one of the most serious human rights violations of our time. It’s concealed by design,” he said.
Backing from big business
Big business is largely in favour of the bill, but wants some tweaks.
The Warehouse, for example, did not want to see a repeat of the sometimes seven-figure costs imposed by climate disclosure reporting introduced by the Labour-Greens Government in 2021.
Many businesses told MPs that companies which were part of multi-national groups covered by modern slavery laws overseas, should be allowed to submit their global modern slavery statements in New Zealand to keep costs down.
Many of New Zealand’s largest companies are Australian-owned, including ASB, ANZ, BNZ, Westpac, IAG, Suncorp, Woolworths, and Wesfarmers, which owns Kmart and Bunnings.
There was concern that large KiwiSaver schemes would incur costs by reporting on modern slavery.
Some businesses wanted the bill tweaked so fines of up to $600,000 could only be imposed on companies, not individual directors, arguing New Zealand was jumping ahead of overseas jurisdictions.
There was concern from Mitre 10 that the bill sought to ban companies that failed to report adequately from doing business with the Government, which could “critically impact businesses for a one-time mistake”.
Yesterday’s bill for today’s problem
The Modern Slavery Bill would require companies caught by the law to publish reports describing how they sought to avoid being a party to modern slavery.
Chris Evans, Australia’s Anti-Slavery Commissioner, said Australia’s slavery reporting laws had changed Australian companies’ attitudes, and that they had now moved to “play the game seriously”.
However, he said: “Due diligence is where the world is going.”
Shaw said re-writing the bill along due diligence lines would give New Zealand “an opportunity to frame our response differently. Not around what we are against. But around who we are, and what we stand for: Freedom, fairness, dignity”.
After hearing from experts, it is now up to MPs to decide whether that happens.