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 chapter documents the research carried out in the garment and textile sector. Individual and group interviews were carried out with 26 women trade union leaders and union representatives from unions in four garment producing countries: El Salva...Read More
Guest editors: Urmila Bhoola & Cindy Berman This edition is concerned with long-term solutions and prevention of child labour – tackling root causes and drivers, as well as enablers of long-term solutions that demonstrate progress and promi...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)),...
Large numbers of Ethiopian women seek domestic work in the “Middle East Corridor”—a signifcant social trend that reflects a key livelihood strategy used by Ethiopian families and communities in the face of widespread poverty (Kuschminder, Ande...Read More
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