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.
I remember one particularly bad factory in China. It produced outdoor tables, parasols, and gazebos, and the place was a mess. Work floors were so crowded with production materials that I could barely make my way from one end to the other. In one ar...Read More
The Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking (OCFT) in the Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) within U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL) has invested in programs over the last 25 years to eliminate child labor and forced lab...Read More
In June 2018, a coalition of global tech companies, civil society organizations, and international institutions jointly launched Tech Against Trafficking (TAT) https://techagainsttrafficking.org, a collaborative effort to support the eradication of ...Read More
Hundreds of migrant victims of human trafficking or labour exploitation are identified in Finland each year. Human trafficking is a serious crime that violates human rights and personal liberty and integrity. The consequences of exploitation and its...Read More
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