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.
This paper explores the prevalence of child labour and long working hours in India using 2019 data, with estimates for boys and girls that deal with age-related child development concerns related to long hours of work. We use international suggestio...Read More
Given the rapid development of initiatives aimed at helping businesses fight human trafficking, the RESPECT Initiative (comprising Babson College’s Initiative on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and the International Organization for Migration (IOM)),...
Every year, more than 100,000 people are detained for migration control purposes in the European Union. Immigration detention places individuals’ lives on hold, as people do not know when, or if, they will ever be released. It has a severe impa...Read More
Over the past decade, third-party labor recruiters who facilitate employment for migrant workers across low- and middle-income countries have often been considered by the counter-trafficking community as one of the main entry points into human traff...Read More
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