SINGAPORE: Personal protective equipment giant Ansell is being taken to task over its ties to a Malaysian glove maker alleged to have subjected workers to forced labour and squalid living conditions inside shipping containers.
The USt Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on Tuesday banned imports from the Brightway Group, the fifth such sanction it has imposed against a single-use glove manufacturer from Malaysia in the past two years.
Malaysia Minister of Human Resources Datuk Seri M Saravanan inspects a Brightway workers’ dormitory in Selangor state last December.
The Malaysian Labour Department later said 781 employees had been living inside three shipping containers.
The US authority said it had blacklisted the company based on “information that reasonably indicates the use of forced labour in that entity’s manufacturing operations”.
The ban has prompted fresh scrutiny on ASX-listed Ansell, which as well as having its own factories in Malaysia – a manufacturing hub for medical gloves – has supply deals with Brightway.
“According to recent US customs records, Brightway Group is a significant supplier of gloves to both Ansell and Kimberly Clarke Corporation (KCC), two of the world’s largest gloves and personal care companies to whom I have also complained about appalling conditions at Brightway Group since early 2020,” migrant worker activist Andy Hall said on Tuesday.
Hall, who made the complaint to US Customs in January, said that while US-based KCC had sought to address forced-labour conditions at Brightway and paid compensation to workers, Ansell’s response to the rights abuse allegations had been “unacceptable”.
He said it had not “seemingly played any role at all in [compensating] victims of modern slavery at Brightway Group”. Ansell said in a statement that it was “working closely with Brightway on remediation plans based on third-party audit findings from earlier this year”.
An earlier Ansell-ordered audit at the Brightway facility in 2019 had not revealed unacceptable living standards.
Brightway was a minor supplier, the Australian company said.
“In line with the advice of human rights and labour experts, Ansell’s preferred practice is to work with suppliers to achieve meaningful improvement, thereby ensuring continued employment and improved conditions for workers, rather than reactively cancelling supplier contracts in response to specific events or allegations,” the statement said.
“Systemic and industry-wide change takes time, and Ansell is committed to being proactive in that change.
“In the case of any supplier that continues to be in breach of modern slavery findings or other aspects of Ansell’s supplier code of conduct and is not showing progress in resolving these issues then we work on developing alternative supply.”
On the back of heightened demand for its products during the pandemic, Ansell has enjoyed a boom in sales and soaring profit, although its shares have fallen from a high of US$43.51 and US$32.01. — Dec 22, 2021
