Factories & sweatshops | Overseas worker exploitation - how does this influence HR at home?

The most obvious responsibility of HR is to respond effectively to complaints from staff, ensuring the workplace is a safe environment.

For organisations that have operations overseas, these responsibilities can sometimes become blurred, as companies outsource their labour to third parties, or exist in areas where labour laws are less strict or non-existent.

This has been brought to light in a recent exclusive from the Guardian that revealed the poor work environments of employees being contracted in countries such as Saudi Arabia. The exposé highlighted multiple examples of workers reporting being forced to work 22-hour days, hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime, being forced to fill out an ‘incident report’ if they left the restaurant and experiencing crass verbal abuse from managers – one worker was repeatedly called ‘an animal’.

Many of these acts are considered unthinkable in the companies of Western countries, however they may be common practice elsewhere. Of course, a HR department in the UK isn’t necessarily responsible for the treatment of workers in another country, especially when labour laws, politics and business can be very different elsewhere.