Responsible Reruitment

Background on Responsible Recruitment

Getting recruitment right is meaningful for your workers, your business and your customers. Knowing and understanding your risks and where you stand in the recruitment process jump-starts your company’s ability to get out ahead of the challenges recruitment brings and unlock competitive advantage opportunities for your business.

Bad Recruitment Means Forced Labor in the Supply Chain

The risk of bad recruitment flows upward. The actions of supervisors, farm labor contractors or other parties involved in recruitment before the worker reaches the farm gate can create blowback for your company and your customers. According to Verité, the top three risks in illegal and unethical hiring practices (illustrated in green on the chart below) can happen during the recruitment phase.

  Understand the Risks of Bad Recruitment

The current labor shortage adds complexity to the issue of recruitment and can create incentive structures that lead to bad practice. Bad recruitment anywhere in the labor supply chain, even if it occurs well before workers reach your farming operation, results in risks and consequences that will be owned at the production level.

Human and Ethical Risk

Just because a company is not charging recruitment fees does not mean their workers haven’t paid elsewhere in their journey to the farm. Many of the most extreme practices occur upstream of the farm gate and they are just as likely, in some cases more likely, to happen if you use guest worker programs like the H-2A program. Even guest workers who come back year after year could be subjected to these illegal fees.

Commercial Risks

Forced labor is currently in the crosshairs of retail customers, consumers, regulators of civil society and the media. Retail buyers’ brands are at stake when a supplier makes headlines for being associated with forced labor, child labor or unethical labor practices. In the fresh produce industry, as more buyers get on board with support for ethical recruitment — major buyers like Costco and Walmart are already incorporating ethical labor practices into their standards — suppliers can expect to be asked with increasing frequency to demonstrate how they are proactively identifying and mitigating recruitment risks in their workforces.

Organizational Risk

Recruitment fees affect incentives for the exploited worker in their job performance and engagement level and this can affect your business negatively by compromising food safety, workplace culture and product quality. For instance, if the worker is most concerned about achieving a high piece rate during harvest in order to repay loans to recruiters, she would be less likely to take the time to stop and report observed red flags for food safety in the fields or to carefully observe the quality of the produce she is harvesting.