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HPE news. Tech insights. World-class innovations. We take you straight to the source — interviewing tech's foremost thought leaders and change-makers that are propelling businesses and industries forward.
JOHN SCHULTZ
When you ask people or you, you mention it to them, they say, oh, I, I thought slavery ended a hundred years ago And the reality is it's worse today than it was five years ago or 10 years ago. and some people would suggest there may be more slaves in the world today than there has been at any point in time.
Goodness, um, in human history
MICHAEL BIRD
That was John Schultz, our guest for today’s episode.
SAM JARRELL
That statistic was really quite horrifying
MICHAEL BIRD
It’s pretty heartbreaking, but there are people fighting back against this which is where John comes into the picture because today, we are going to be talking all about how technology is being used to try and combat modern slavery.
I’m Michael Bird
SAM JARRELL
I'm Sam Jarrell
MICHAEL BIRD
And welcome to Technology Now from HPE.
MICHAEL BIRD
Modern slavery can be found all over the world, across all sorts of industries and across all levels of the supply chain – from child labourers right up to service workers who we might interact with at a restaurant . Even the tech industry has to fight to keep modern slavery out of its supply chain.
SAM JARRELL
And supply chains can be really opaque so I can’t imagine this is a particularly easy fight.
MICHAEL BIRD
It very much is not, however there are ways that people and organisations can try and help.
We now have access to forms data sharing and analysis which didn’t exist ten or twenty years ago and this data can be vital when it comes to spotting, tracking, and ultimately trying to shut down instances of modern slavery. Being able to link together information across countries and continents can help us to build a much clearer picture of the problem.
SAM JARRELL
Right, because it can be really difficult for anyone, no matter how well meaning or well-intentioned they are, to actually make a difference if they don’t know something is going on in the first place…
MICHAEL BIRD
Exactly. And we need to link up data being connected across all points in a supply chain from organisations, or governments, all the way down to the people at the very start of the supply chain to get this overview and be able to act quickly when new information becomes available.
So, to find out more about it, I spoke to John Schultz, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating & Legal Officer for HPE who explained to me how bad the situation is, and also how HPE are fighting back against Modern Slavery.
but before we got to any of that, John started at the very beginning and explained to me just how people can end up as victims of modern slavery in the first place.
JOHN SCHULTZ
Well, it's a complicated, issue because you can find slavery in pretty much every country in the world, in probably almost every industry.
but it is as, heinous as individuals who have been trafficked in living in conditions, working in dangerous situations, and basically not being paid. And their freedom is completely restricted, whether that's in mining or. It's in phishing or even in the electronics industry. In other instances, it can be a little more subtle, but nevertheless, still, an absolute human rights violation like someone who is, offered a job and they leave Nepal to go to Malaysia.
And they have to pay a recruiter a fee for this job. Money they don't have. And so when they get to Malaysia, they're working in very difficult conditions. Their passport is taken, they're kind of almost in indentured servitude and bondage to work off the recruitment fee.
Right. And they are people who simply were looking for some opportunity to make some money and often send it back home, where the opportunities are less.
MICHAEL BIRD
But presumably, modern slavery is becoming something that, is happening less and less.
JOHN SCHULTZ
I think most people presume it doesn't exist. You know, when you ask people or you, you mention it to them, they say, oh, I, I thought slavery ended a hundred years ago And the reality is it's worse today than it was five years ago or 10 years ago. and some people would suggest there may be more slaves in the world today than there has been at any point in time.
Goodness, um, in human history. So, uh, this is definitely not a good news story.
MICHAEL BIRD
So is there an economic impact from modern day slavery?
JOHN SCHULTZ
certainly, the slave traders and the folks who engage in this, believe they're making some kind of, profit for themselves. Mm-hmm.
But society as a whole is suffering. There is definitely data out there that shows, that economies that have a significant amount of slavery in. suffer as a result of it. and then there's just the basic human cost. I mean, the idea that in, 2026, we still have, tens of millions of slaves in the in the world is just kind of beyond belief.
MICHAEL BIRD
so how bad is the current situation then? Yeah.
JOHN SCHULTZ
some estimates, have the full number up into the 40, 50 million slaves worldwide and growing, just in the four labor space, we think that number is larger than 25 million. And, likely under states the number. and again, we tend to think of it when we hear it that, oh, this must be the poorest African nations, or it must be these far-flung places in Asia but we know, there have been quite a few incidents in things like nail salons in the US I mean, that's how crazy this
MICHAEL BIRD
So. how did it get to this point? what are the drivers for modern slavery?
JOHN SCHULTZ
there is one common factor and that's darkness. No one for the most part is pro-slavery. the reason it can exist
is because it's hidden often in plain view and either that's because we don't have the data or we're just not looking.
I like to say data's the best disinfectant. If we can get smarter and we can shine the light, we can get rid of slavery because it doesn't survive in the open It only survives in darkness.
MICHAEL BIRD
And why is it increasing? Because, presumably governments are aware of this, organizations are aware of this. is it just because, the world's population's increasing?
JOHN SCHULTZ
I think the world's population's increasing. I think we're continuing to see dislocation a great example, is if you take the current unrest in Myanmar, that's dislocated large populations. it's not surprising then that you've seen these gigantic scam centers, right. You know, all the online scams. Many of them are basically people who've been tricked to come to something, which they thought was a call center.
And all it is, is basically, a slave camp. I think also, with technology, unfortunately, the folks who engage in this, activity are getting more sophisticated. They can reach more people. So I think there's a lot of reasons why it's getting worse, but I think the thing that we're most focused is how do we turn the tide?
Because what we're doing today, as much as we're doing across a variety of communities, it's just not good enough.
MICHAEL BIRD
So the UN are aimed to eradicate slavery by 2030? Yeah. Why has this not been successful?
JOHN SCHULTZ
there are a lot of really dedicated and well-intentioned people, and we spend time with folks who've put, 30 plus years into this fight, and they have generated results in areas, right?
But in some ways, you've got this disconnected effort. and you can feel as though you're doing good when in fact, at the end of the day, you're not winning the war. and so what we've been focused on in Hewlett Packard Enterprise is bringing people together to make everyone more effective through technology.
W e live in the age of insights, as Antonio likes to say. It's all about the data, and if you have better insights, you can drive better outcomes. And that's where, our effort with the World Economic Forum, launched a year ago to establish a global data partnership that is simply intended to take the people who are right now fighting slavery and make them more effective.
Yeah. And do it one country at a time.
MICHAEL BIRD
I wanna talk about the data partnership in a bit, but,
why is it so difficult to remove modern slavery from our supply chains in particular?
JOHN SCHULTZ
if you think about what supply chains look like today in comparison to what they look like 20 or even 50 years ago, right?
just take a, basic server, the sheer, number of components, the number of suppliers involved. Tracing all the way down to the minerals, it's almost impossible. We do the best we can, but it is hard to get full end-to-end visibility, especially because in many, instances you may just have a scenario where even the company you're doing business with doesn't actually know that someone. In their employment is actually leveraging slave labor.
MICHAEL BIRD
Okay. So let's talk about combating modern slavery. Yeah. Are legislators important? In the, in the fight against foreign slavery?
JOHN SCHULTZ
Absolutely. there are some good laws on the books, in the us in the UK and elsewhere. there's the due diligence, act, so there are, there are some good legislative, actions there. probably can be more, enforcement is also a key. there are definitely jurisdictions where.
Folks seem to tend to look the other way, either because they themselves are corrupt. There may be cultural issues and the like. So legislation and government action is absolutely critical, but even that by itself will not be enough.
MICHAEL BIRD
Because I suppose in this scenario you're talking about where, even the business owner doesn't know then it's way more pervasive Than you might think
JOHN SCHULTZ
It's way more pervasive, and unfortunately, in many instances it's profitable. Yeah. And until you take the money out of it, um, the behavior won't stop
MICHAEL BIRD
How'd you take the money out of it?
JOHN SCHULTZ
So we think by getting a concerted action across
The folks who deal at the survivor level mm-hmm.
Through the NGOs who provide a higher level support to the government and to companies. Right. At the end of the day, what we can focus on and control is what I call, uh, the corporate economy, what is generated through the global chain. And if that community could do better job of finding these incidents of slavery and cutting it off, then the money goes away.
MICHAEL BIRD
It sort of sounds like a non-governmental, international, multi-business collaboration to combat modern slavery
JOHN SCHULTZ
I actually think that probably makes it sound more complicated than it is, Right. At its very core, it's just about data sharing. So lemme give you an example. Right. We do a lot of work to try to figure out our supply chain, et cetera. We do audits, but the truth of the matter is, is you can only audit so many places and so many times, and the like, right? the flip side is you have workers on the ground, whether they're in a mine, whether they're in electronics factory or the like, if their experience and their information.
It can move all the way up the chain, All of a sudden you can make connections that don't require some big collaborative agreement, et cetera. You just need the information sharing. Mm-hmm. So assume for a moment someone has, been, extricated from, slavery. and they identified an address where they were held And the names of a couple of people that were involved,
And we had the ability on our end to have the names of the people we know are that are involved in our supply chain and every address that we have. If we can through AI, continue to monitor these data sources and we see, Hey, this address popped up, This name popped up. Now we don't have to rely on a blind audit. We can say, hold on a second. We should go to that site and we should talk to these people right now. Right now. Right.
If you can now magnify that across the entire industry, across
all of corporate world, where all of the supply chains are monitoring those, making that connection, right, that can be fed to government or government happens to see suspicious activity and it shows up in a government report. We see it in our, AI agent, agent, boom, we're off to the races and vice versa. So AI can do all of that for us. You just need the data.
MICHAEL BIRD
this is the global data partnership?
JOHN SCHULTZ
This is Global Data Partnership
MICHAEL BIRD
so just can you just talk through that in a bit more detail?
JOHN SCHULTZ
it's new. We launched it at Davos a year ago in partnership with the World Economic Forum. a team of folks at, Hewlett Packard Enterprise who've been working in this space, including my cohort in crime, [BM1.1]
We've gotten great support, from folks in, advisory and professional services. from the CTO's office, and, many other organizations. but we came to this conclusion having worked in this problem for a while, that this information gap was critical.
That a little bit like what you see in companies, lots of activity, but it's not generating enough outcomes. And so the question was why, and what we concluded was. We needed better insights for everybody involved. You could work your own little piece of the problem and think you were doing a great job, which you were, but you weren't actually solving the larger problem.
So the way the Global data partnership works, and we're doing a proof of concept in Thailand with the Thai government, Everybody contributes their data. corporations like HPE, the government. migrant worker groups on the ground. We have the, international organization for migrant workers. We have, the labor union, We have folks who deal in supply chain due diligence. We've got a great set of partners and The idea is, hey, keep your data.
We don't need to aggregate it. Keep it where it is. We don't even need to read the specific data so we don't have to violate your sort of personal, sovereignty. Mm. But AI can allow us to extract insights and we can all use those insights to be
MICHAEL BIRD
What's the most important thing that our organizations can do to combat modern slavery?
JOHN SCHULTZ
What's the most important thing that our organizations can do to combat modern slavery?
MICHAEL BIRD
Do you have any examples of where we have successfully combated modern slavery?
JOHN SCHULTZ
Well, I certainly think that if you go back and look at the history of our supply chain work, we. A, a very good job of eradicating, instances of forced labor.
We've been a leader, in the movement to make sure there's no recruiting fees and, and passports aren't taken. And the, like, that goes all the way back to the days when the regulations came in around conflict minerals, for example. We've won several awards for that. So I feel great about that and I, think that's an instance where we've made, huge progress.
Again, with supply chains getting more complex, more global, more fragmented and distributed, we have to go further and we have to do more. we know of other instances. just last night, spent time with, the head of the International Justice Mission. He's been doing this for 30 years, you know, and he can cite you examples where in, combination with A specific state in India over eight years. they were able to, free 350,000 people from slavery through a combined effort. We know things work. we just have to do more of it. It has to be more targeted because otherwise we don't have the resources to. Do it effectively.And again,there's so much money in it,that,we just gotta be smarter about the way that we go about,driving it to zero.
MICHAEL BIRD
Amazing. John, thank you so much for joining us on technology now. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you.
JOHN SCHULTZ
My pleasure. Thank you very much.
MICHAEL BIRD
Yeah, that was, uh, it was quite a powerful interview. My biggest takeaway was that that clip that we had at, at the top of the show, which was, modern slavery is worse today than it's ever been.
SAM JARRELL
I watched a documentary recently, about a guy who had his passport taken, essentially, he thought he was going for an engineering job in a foreign country and ended up stuck doing romance scams in a center. And essentially it, they functioned sort of like call center and they had like metrics and things that they would hit. It felt very, very corporatized. So it's, yeah, it's crazy to, to think that there are more people who are enslaved today.
it just looks different than what we're used to thinking of it as.
MICHAEL BIRD
I know we've done a project at HPE, where, if you go into our CICs, uh, around the world, there was some photography from an amazing photographer, who went to some of the different places where some of these materials.
to make our technology, were taken. And it's basically slave labor. People, you know, mining, various different minerals and metals. and you think, These photos can't be from the last year or two years or three years.
These must be, decades old. But they're not, they're, they're modern. And John said 40 to 50 million slaves is the prediction. That is an absolute staggering amount of people and what I thought was interesting was, the fact it's hidden often in plain sight. but I suppose the positive was you know, how we can use technology to combat it.
SAM JARRELL
I appreciated how transparent John was, like, we're not claiming perfection over here either. he was saying that this stuff is actually quite hard, even for the companies that do take it very, very seriously. I, I was interested to learn and hear him speak about how there are different.
Companies and organizations who are working really hard in like their one little area and feeling like they're making a big difference, but it doesn't, it doesn't move the needle or like have the impact on the actual slavery system that seems to exist. And so it, it takes having a much more coordinated partnership than just sort of our individual efforts to, to stop all of this stuff.
MICHAEL BIRD
Yeah, he used the phrase data is the best disinfectant. We talk about good data, particularly as it relates to training AI models, and I suppose it's the same here.
John talks a little about darkness, didn't he? So, you know, bringing this to light, through, the global data partnership, which was, making connections using AI based on various different data sources
SAM JARRELL
I quite like the AI piece of it all because I think that, um, you know, obviously we work for a, a tech company and so we're familiar with. Some use cases for AI as a force for good, but I think sometimes it can get a bit controversial and there are things that AI really does quite well and that we can use to actually improve the lives of people.
And this is a very, very clear cut and dry case of it, right?
MICHAEL BIRD
Yeah, I would agree. I This feels like a really noble and, a good use of ai, it's playing to its strengths.
so Sam, uh, now I, I did wanna leave this episode on somewhat more of a positive note. So one of the most important things I asked John was, uh, what can we, as in you and me, and our, and our listeners do as everyday people to combat modern slavery?
SAM JARRELL
Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week.
Thank you to our guest, John Schultz
And of course, to our listeners.
Thank you so much for joining us.
MICHAEL BIRD
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week.
Technology Now is hosted by Sam Jarrell and myself, Michael Bird
This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Izzie Clarke with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Beckie Bird, Alissa Mitry, and Janessa Ayache. Our theme music was composed by Greg Hooper.
SAM JARRELL
Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado.
MICHAEL BIRD
Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
(and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers!
SAM JARRELL
Bye y’all