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.
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
Slavery is a complex phenomenon and a pervasivescar on humanity. The control of another person, theexploitation of their body and labour, and the removalof their rights, is a degradation of all concerned. It isall too easy to see this as a problem o...Read More
Battling Human Trafficking: How Far Have We Come and Where Do We Go From Here? A Scrutiny of Private Sector Obligations under the Modern Slavery Act by Lucia Bird Ruiz-Benitez de Lugo co-published by the Global Initiative against Transnational Or...Read More
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
2020 © Copyright, RESPECT International. All Rights Reserved. Website Disclaimer | Privacy Policy
