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.
Authors:Louise Shelley Hirst Chair and Director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason UniversityChristina Bain Director of the Initiative on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Babson College Human tr...Read More
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
Case records on identified victims of human trafficking are highly sensitive, yet the ability to share such data is critical to evidence-based practice and policy development across government, business, and civil society. We propose new methods to...Read More
In December 2020, the Lebanese Parliament passed the landmark Law 205 against sexual harassment that could see perpetrators spend up to four years in prison and pay fines up to fifty times the minimum wage. The law additionally affords protection to...Read More
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