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.
In June 2018, a coalition of global tech companies, civil society organizations, and international institutions jointly launched Tech Against Trafficking (TAT), a cooperative effort to support the eradication of human trafficking and in which the Glo...Read More
The due diligence expectations contained in the OECD Guidelines and United Nations Guiding Principles (UNGPs) have always, since their inception in 2011, been intended to take a risk-based approach that includes the full “value chain” of busines...Read More
“Here, the salary is not about what you bring to the table. I will never get the same salary as an Arab colleague. There is a lot of discrimination against people from Africa. We are only hired in some types of jobs - security, housekeeping, the k...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
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