Is slavery baked into your Smart Water Utility?
The book Smart Water Utilities supports the work of the now 20 year old organisation ’Free the Slaves’. Slavery has always been in human civilisation but today it is prohibited in all nations. So most of us believe that this is a closed chapter.
However, today approx. 40 mio people are enslaved through labor slavery, forced marriage slavery, sex slavery and child slavery. I was surprised to find that even in my country Denmark there is an estimate of several hundreds of slaves and news stories of liberated slaves.
The organisation Free The Slaves works in different ways and have freed more than 14.000 slaves, reached out to more than 650.000 people who are in ’trafficking hot spots’ and played a role in arresting more than 300 traffickers and slaveholders. Impressive numbers for a pro bono organisation – and still a very small drop in the ocean of this problem. Primary factors to reduce slavery is reducing extreme poverty which makes people vulnerable to slave dealers and holders. So, again the SDG’s may play an important role here.
What you can do – according to the organisation - is:
- Educate yourself about modern day slavery
- Talk about modern day slavery to raise awareness
- Consume slavery free products
Some level of transparency on the last point can be found on the website knowthechain.org which benchmarks companies in the three industrial areas of ’Information and Communication Technology’, ’Food and Beverage’ and ’Apparal and Footwear’.
For Smart Water Utility readers especially the first industry may be important to research. Here, you can read about the anti-slavery efforts of companies such as Cisco, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, Intel, NVIDIA, Texas Instruments and Xilinx.
Links:
Read the book: https://www.iwapublishing.com/books/9781780407579/smart-water-utilities-complexity-made-simple
Support the organisation or learn more: https://www.freetheslaves.net/
Research the IT industry: https://knowthechain.org/company-lists/