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Slave-Free
Challenges:
Last year, slave traders made $32 Billion, more than Nike, Starbucks and Google combined. Pervasive awareness and marketplace solutions are among the largest and best opportunities to significantly reverse the profitability from human trafficking.
Slave-Free currently represents the biggest potential for a marketplace solution. Using cameras and cell-phones, consumers upload photos of the Slave-Free label held against the products they buy thus creatively exhibiting the EXPANDING MARKET for the Slave-Free brand. Consumers can then click on the brands they use at chainstorereaction.com to send messages to companies demanding their products be Slave-Free.
How could the products we use today be made by slaves? Slave labor drives down the price of raw materials. Companies purchase the cheapest materials in order to sell their products at a reduced cost. Consumers buy lower cost items, ultimately (though unknowingly) promoting slavery, and thus creating the $32 Billion business of the people trade, leaving over 20 Million people in forced labor (UN Working Group).
However, by both creating market demand and facilitating corporate compliance, Slave-Free addresses the primary obstacles inhibiting a company's examination of slave labor in their product chains. Successful elimination results in the award of the Slave-Free label for those products investigated.
Companies have already begun to express interest in the certification process to acquire the Slave-Free label. However, supply equals demand. Thus, it will ultimately be pervasive expansion of the global community requesting Slave-Free products and a website like slavefree.us to provide this community its platform. Thousands of pictures displayed and emails sent by consumers "DEMANDING THE BRAND" will unavoidably force SUPPLY, thus CREATING CHANGE. Furthermore, the eventual ubiquity of Slave- Free products indirectly expands awareness of the horrors of modern day slavery, resulting in an increase in market demand and creating a self-promoting circle.
finally a tool that works
I have been searching for a way to tangibly get involved in the 21st century abolitionist movement. SlaveFREE has massive potential to work with the companies I already buy from to certify their supply chains as SlaveFREE. This is a brilliant grass roots platform.