Fat profits on the one hand, starvation wages on the other: The inequalities along the supply chains for our food are enormous. Dieter Schwarz, owner of Lidl and Kaufland, earns the annual income of a farmworker on a pineapple plantation in Costa Rica every six seconds. While German supermarkets earned record profits during the pandemic, farmworkers on the plantations supplying produce for the supermarket shelves had to work for wages that barely suffice to feed a family.
Especially precarious is the situation facing migrant workers in agriculture. Without them, the supply chains for numerous foodstuffs would collapse. For a number of products, migrant workers represent half the workforce or more. Many of them leave their homeland to earn a living as seasonal workers. In return, they often must accept exploitative working conditions. For many migrants, these conditions nevertheless amount to the best of several bad options, given the difficult circumstances in their homelands.
The CHRB is part of WBA, which seeks to generate a movement around increasing the private sector’s impact towards a sustainable future for all. The CHRB produces benchmarks that rank global companies on their human rights performance. WBA is d...Read More
Britain is in an employment crisis. Labour shortages are hitting record highs and firms are recruiting from abroad which is costly. At the same time there are currently more than 7,000 survivors of modern slavery who are being supported by the G...Read More
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has placed mil- lions of indigenous Uyghur and Kazakh citizens from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR or Uyghur Region) into what the government calls “surplus labour” (富余劳动力) ...Read More
In 2011, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously endorsed the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework (UNGPs), introducing a new standard and authoritat...Read More
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