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.
Forced labor is a feature, not a bug, in today’s global economic system. Forced labor spans the globe. It involves multinational corporations. It is found in special economic zones—and war zones. And it is in everyone’s backyard. Globally, 27....Read More
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
Gender-based violence and harassment (GBVH) has been well documented in fashion supply chains for decades. Despite this, the realities for women garment workers – who toil to make the clothes in our closets – has remained largely unchanged. T...Read More
The voices of children and young people who have experienced human trafficking, modern slavery or exploitation are missing from debates in the UK, with their opinions rarely taken into account in the development of law, policy and services. This inc...Read More
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