MADE IN A FREE WORLD / SLAVERY FOOTPRINT

San Francisco creative agency MUH-TAY-ZIK HOF-FER and digital partners at London's unit9 have created an innovative calculator that allows you to figure out how many slaves are working for you.

The Slavery Footprint effort is for Made In a Free World, from Call + Response, a nonprofit dedicated to ending slavery, along with the U.S. State Department, and includes the online calculator, and a social effort that will raise awareness and put pressure on brands with forced labor in their supply chains.

The calculator is the crux of the effort, and allows you to catalog your modern life using fun animated icons and sliders. You find out shocking facts about modern slavery along the way, such as the doozy that there are more children forcibly employed harvesting cotton in Uzbekistan (1.4 million) than New York City public schools.

'It seems obvious, but "How many slaves work for you?" was a big break-through when we got there,' says MUH-TAY-ZIK HOF-FER's ECD, John Matejczyk. It was a way to make the results relevant, and the question compelling, rather than an abstract score. Everything was built around that.

A very thorough 'Methodology' page highlights how the calculation works, and how the site can show 'the number of forced laborers that were likely to be involved in creating and manufacturing the products you buy.'

'We're absolutely not anti-consumer,' Matejczyk says. 'If everyone stopped buying stuff, slavery would go up, not down. We want to join with brands and incentivize them to review their supply chains all the way back.'

A companion mobile app, called 'Made in a Free World', allows people on-the-move to make inquiries about what a brand's supply chain looks like from an ethical labor point of view and call attention to their questioning. For instance, checking in at a brand will create a post on both the brand's Slavery Footprint page and the main Slavery Footprint page. MUH-TAY-ZIK created over 1,000 individual brand pages on Facebook to aggregate the inquiries.

Additionally, the group is partnering with MTV to encourage several thousand university campuses to compete to see which can earn the most 'Free World' points, by choosing ethically sourced products.

The contributors hope the Made In a Free World label may be applied as a label to products with ethical histories, like LEED certification or wind turbine manufacturer Vestas' WindMark effort from earlier this year.