Hall in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Photo Illustration: 731; Photo: Rajneesh Bhandari for Bloomberg Businessweek; Emails: Courtesy Andy Hall‘Playing God’: This Labor Activist’s Relentless Emails Force Companies to Change
Andy Hall scours the global supply chain on behalf of exploited workers. If you ever hear from him, just know he won’t go away quietly.
The three men sped in silence through the sultry Malaysian night. In the back seat was Dhan Kumar Limbu, a 32-year-old factory worker. In the front were two officials from his employer, an electronics maker called ATA IMS Bhd. The car snaked through the streets of Johor Bahru, an industrial hub, and stopped at a police station near the heart of the city. Limbu stepped out with a sinking feeling in his stomach. He knew he was in trouble.
Like so many other Nepalese migrant workers, Limbu toiled in the vast warren of global supply chains. For much of the past nine years, he’d worked 12-hour shifts plus overtime, seven days a week, at ATA, a contract manufacturer whose most important client was the British vacuum maker Dyson. He’d recently been put in touch with an associate of Andy Hall, one of Southeast Asia’s best-known human-rights activists. Fed up with his drudgery, Limbu had begun sending pictures of the factory’s interior, as well as internal documents such as production lists, to show that parts of Dyson products were made by workers laboring under gruesome conditions. Now, somehow, ATA was onto him.