Human & labour rights

As more media firms become data providers, with big government contracts, a reckoning on human rights is coming, say Emma Pullman and Paul Finch.

Workers in apparel supply chains are among the hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even before the pandemic, workers had to survive on poverty wages; in the first three months of the pandemic alone, workers lost at least US$3 billion in income. Poverty, discrimination, a lack of labor protections, and restrictions on movement form the breeding ground for exploitation and forced labor risks— and the Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically worsened these factors. Workers’ already meager livelihoods were taken away and many lack the support of social and labor protections, which do not extend to (undocumented) migrant workers.

On 1 February 2021, Myanmar’s military staged a coup in a brutal attempt to reimpose military rule, nullifying the results of the November 2020 elections, arresting and detaining democratically elected members of parliament and declaring a state of emergency. Over 820 civilians have been killed and thousands detained since the coup. Attacks against ethnic communities have intensified, including indiscriminate airstrikes. Gross human rights violations have become widespread and systematic, amounting to crimes against humanity.

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