Workers’ rights in the food industry

A quarter of the world’s population works in agriculture. It is the world’s largest industry and worth $12 trillion every year. 

Yet, the way that we currently produce, trade and consume food has left many of the industry’s workers without even the most basic rights.

What are workers' rights issues in the food industry?

The food industry has a litany of workers’ rights abuses. These are some of the key issues that must be tackled in our food system. 

1. Poverty wages

There are 500 million smallholder farmer households globally. They produce around 30% of the world’s total food. Many smallholder farmers are amongst the poorest people in the world. Often smallholders are paid appallingly low prices for their produce. 

For example, around 80% of the world’s coffee comes from smallholder farms, almost all in the Global South. However, in many places the legacies of colonialism affect the ability for smallholder farmers to trade their crop fairly. According to Chris Ouloch from Fairtrade Africa, “After colonialism ended and coffee-growing land was returned to native producers, many of them were only left with small parcels of land.” 

Today this means they often have to sell their coffee through established multinationals. Foreign exporters will buy green coffee at a low price from the growers, and roast it abroad to sell at many times the price. This means that farmers get a fraction of the product’s final value – only a tiny portion compared to the multinational’s profits.

This is true for many food items e.g. cocoa beans into chocolate. The profit comes from additional processing which is nearly always carried out elsewhere. In contrast, some of our best buy chocolate brands make the chocolate at source.

Where food is produced on a larger scale, low incomes are often passed on to farm workers. A worker in the tea industry receives on average just 38% of the living wage. Even in the UK, the agricultural industry has by far the largest proportion of low income insecure work of any sector. 

As a result, many of those producing our food face ‘in-work poverty’. In 2018, an Oxfam report on conditions for banana workers in Ecuador – the biggest exporter of the fruit – found that most workers were living “a hand-to-mouth existence.” In 2019, Oxfam found that two-thirds of banana workers said they did not earn enough to cover basic needs. 

“Money is extremely tight. We must cut down on food to be able to pay our children’s school fees.” Yensy, wife of a worker at the pineapple plantation Finca Once, Lidl supplier quoted in a 2018 Oxfam report. 

Even where the legal minimum wage is respected on plantations, in packing factories or in other parts of the food supply chain, it may not be enough to provide a sufficient income.

2. Precarious work

Many of those hired to work on farms or in packing facilities are also denied secure work. They might be employed seasonally, on temporary contracts, given work only when needed, paid by the amount of food they pick, or employed via an agency rather than the workplace itself. 

In southern Spain, fruit and vegetable farms supplying to UK supermarkets employ pickers during harvest season. Workers – many of whom are migrants – will often be employed on a day-by-day basis rather than offered longer-term contracts. They wait on the side of the road to see whether they will be offered employment that day:

"It is the fifth day in a row that I've come here and no employer has shown up,” Abderrazak, a 47-year-old migrant from Morocco told DW in 2019. “It's very difficult to find work. We wait here every day from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and then go home."

Precarious work comes with many issues attached, on top of its inherent insecurity: employers can take advantage to pay these workers less, force them to do unsafe jobs or offer them worse contracts. Often precarious workers won’t know their rights or terms of employment. “I have never signed a contract in my whole life,” a worker on a farm in South Africa cultivating grapes for Lidl told Oxfam in 2017. Demanding change is therefore extremely difficult.

3. Denial of union rights

Working together to demand change is essential for food workers ensuring their rights. Worker-led organisations, including unions, have improved conditions for many around the world. 

In Florida, tomato pickers organised to tackle forced labour, wage theft, sexual assault and other abuses on farms through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Over two decades, they persuaded multiple farms to sign up to a labour code of conduct defined by the workers. Interviewed by CNN in 2018, Alejandrina Carrera, a worker on one of the farms to have signed the code, said that she was grateful for the higher wages but most of all for the change to how she’s treated: 

"You're not going to be harassed, you're not going to be insulted, you're not going to be forced to work. There's more respect now," she said.

In Colombia, strong unionisation has likewise led to better conditions for banana workers. Wages and conditions are generally far above those in any other agricultural workplace in the country, and the best in the global banana industry.

“If we didn’t have our union talking with all the companies here in Urabá, we’d still be living in misery,” one Colombian worker told Banana Link.

Yet, in many places workers are denied the basic right to organise. Workers may be isolated on farms or fishing boats. If they do manage to organise they may face repercussions: they may be illegally fired, blacklisted by all employers in the region, or harassed and forced into unsafe work.

Hosein, a farm worker in southern Spain, showed Ethical Consumer scars on his hands and wrists from work he was given after being involved in a strike. He says he was told to start cleaning the channels on the roof of the greenhouse, where his hands were cut and scratched by wires. “It’s like being in a circus. I have nothing to protect me, no helmet, no safety harness, no special shoes.” When he complained, he says, he was sanctioned. After three sanctions he can be sacked. 

In some countries, the law restricts workers from organising. For example, in Malaysia, abuses in the palm oil industry have been linked to laws that make organising strikes difficult and force strikers to return to work if the employer demands the issue goes to the Industrial Court. 

5. Gender inequality

For women, many of these conditions can be even more severe. 

In 2018, Oxfam reported, “Women bear the heaviest burden. Overwhelmingly concentrated in the least secure and lowest paid positions in food supply chains, shouldering most of the unpaid work on family farms, and routinely denied a voice in positions of power, we show that our modern food system is built on squeezing women’s labour hardest of all.”

Women often lack access to the basic necessities that can protect agricultural workers, such as access to land and capital. For example, in India, only 13% of women own the land they work on and rarely in their own name. Yet, they provide between 60 – 80% of agricultural labour. Likewise, women are likely to have little or no capital of their own with which to pay for land rent, agrichemical inputs, and machinery used in rice farming. In many cultures, they hold much weaker positions in terms of bargaining, with those who provide loans or buy crops such as rice – often the same person, which can lead to debt entrapment. 

In agricultural industries where the majority of workers are women, the average pay amounts to just 55% of the living wage, compared to 71% in industries where men prevail, according to Oxfam. In 2016, a Lidl supplier in Ecuador reportedly cut wages for all female workers so that they were just a third of those of the male workers. 

Women also face specific gender-based abuses such as sexual harassment and assault, lack of maternity rights or mandatory pregnancy testing before being employed. 

Workers in southern Spain spoke to Al Jazeera about sexual assault that they were facing on local farms. One worker, Hadiya, stated:

“If a man likes a female employee, he harasses her. That’s just how it is.”

Another worker, Saeeda, stated, “When the manager hires a woman, he demands something in return.” 

6. Discrimination against migrant workers

Some employers exploit the fact that migrant workers face fewer protections. They can be entitled to fewer rights under local laws; they may be undocumented and in fear of deportation; or they may be isolated or even more dependent on their wages and therefore less likely to speak out.

The palm oil industry in Malaysia is dependent on migrant workers. One in four of those who have moved from Indonesia to Malaysia work on the plantations. Malaysia still has not ratified the UN Refugee Convention, leaving many migrants and refugees unprotected. 

In 2019, Solidar Switzerland found that, “most of the difficult and dangerous work on [palm oil] plantations is carried out by Indonesian migrant workers, of whom around 840,000 are undocumented [...] Around 50,000-200,000 children live with their parents on these plantations and help their families to survive by picking fruit and other work. The children born on plantations are often stateless, as Malaysia does not issue birth certificates to the children of migrant workers. They have no access to public schools or medical care.” The NGO traced violations back to Nestle products. 

Sadly, such abuses of migrant rights are seen around the world. 

In southern Spain around a third of those picking salad vegetables are undocumented migrants. Some workers report ‘contract blackmail’: they are illegally forced to pay their employer up to £6,000 for a contract that will allow them to apply for documented status. In 2021, El País reported the story of Lamin, a 38-year-old from The Gambia, picking  vegetables in the greenhouses: 

“In 2017 a man claiming to be a lawyer offered me a contract for picking tomatoes. It cost me 1,500 euros.” After paying, Lamin was told that his application for the contract had been rejected. He was told, “The money’s gone. If you’ve got a problem with that, call the police.”

Why are workers’ rights often poor in the food industry?

Many factors have led to the food system we have today and the workers’ rights abuses associated with it. 

Colonial violence and agriculture

Our food system has been directly shaped by the violence of colonialism - its land grabs, slavery and imperial control over who gets to eat. 

In India, where 10% of the UK’s tea is produced, the direct links between colonialism and modern labour abuses are clear. The region of Assam is the largest tea-producing area in the world. During the colonial period, “largely tribal people were lured from central India – where they faced disease and starvation – to become tea labourers on remote plantations in Assam.” According to Oxfam, they faced “the kind of brutality associated with the African slave trade”. 

Many tea workers in Assam today are descendants of these workers. Oxfam says that “some of the worst characteristics of the colonial tea trade have persisted, including the almost total dependence of tea workers on their employers.” 

Today, we also see the legacy of colonialism in many of our systems, and the way they disregard agricultural workers’ rights. 

Another example is the chocolate industry. During colonialism, Britain began exporting cocoa from colonies like Ghana, “buying low and selling high” to generate revenues. As in many industries, it extracted resources from the Global South in order to capture profits in the Global North. 

Poverty is known to be the key driver of workers’ rights abuses in cocoa producing countries. Yet, these days, raw cocoa is still largely exported and processed abroad. This is despite the fact that manufacturing is by far the most valuable stage in the supply chain, capturing 40% of the final price of chocoloate. 

Commodification of food

With the rise of industrial farming over the last century, food is now treated as a commodity to be traded for profit. As the squeeze on farmgate prices shows, the drive for profits demands ever lower costs on farms, fisheries and smallholdings. In real terms, this translates to a race-to-the-bottom in terms of workers' rights. 

Oxfam says: 

“We know it doesn’t have to be this way. The global food industry generates billions in revenues every year, but the rewards are increasingly skewed towards the powerful. Our evidence shows that supermarket giants are capturing an increasing share of the money their customers spend at the checkout, while just a small and declining fraction reaches those who produced their food.

“The resulting inequality is hard to fathom. It would take a woman working in a shrimp processing plant in Thailand more than 5,000 years to make the average annual salary of a top executive at a supermarket in the US, and over 1,700 years to match the UK’s. Just 10% of the cash returned to shareholders of the biggest three US supermarkets in 2016 would be enough to lift more than 600,000 workers in the Thai shrimp sector to a living wage.”

Increased corporate control of food system is driving climate crisis

War on Want’s new report ‘Profiting from Hunger: Popular Resistance to Corporate Food Systems’ reveals how increasing corporate control of the industrialised global food system – which it says is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions – is driving the climate crisis and the impoverishment of millions across the Global South, while making vast profits for a handful of corporate monopolies.

Sabrina Espeleta, Senior Programmes Officer at War on Want, said:

'The global food system produces enough food to feed the world twice over – yet almost 800 million people globally are going hungry. Food and land are human rights and cannot be treated as simply ‘commodities’ and ‘assets’ for corporate profit. Peasant farming is already feeding most of the world – it produces the main source of nutrition for 70% of the global population, on less than 30% of arable land. Peasant farming works, and if applied more widely could grow a much larger percentage of the world’s food, solving both global hunger and malnutrition. Food sovereignty offers a practical solution to feeding the world, reducing poverty and inequality, and protecting the Earth’s biodiversity.'

Major subsidies, loans and international policies have also ushed Global South countries towards export-led agriculture – an important source of hard currency, needed to access international markets and pay off foreign debts. Large fertile swathes of land are now devoted to producing cash crops for supermarkets and consumers in the Global North. North African countries no longer grow enough wheat to feed their own populations, instead growing berries, tomatoes and other crops for export to the EU and UK – while relying on wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine.

Find out more and take action

• Read more about the Profiting from Hunger report
• Demand that the UK government works toward global food sovereignty – sign the War on Want petition

What can consumers do about workers’ rights?

1. Pressure your supermarket to change

There are lots of big bad players in the food industry: supermarkets are certainly up there. All of the major supermarkets in the UK lost marks under Workers’ Rights in our supermarkets guide. Over recent decades, they have driven down prices for farmers thereby squeezing workers’ rights. 

Contacting your supermarket can be a real way to push for change. You could contact them on a specific issue. (Check out our campaign demanding better Workers’ Rights for migrants picking their fruit and vegetables in southern Spain.) Or you could contact them to say you want to see better standards across the board. 

2. Buy from more ethical brands

In lots of sectors, smaller ethical companies are popping up who are really doing something different. You can find our Best Buys listed in our guides to chocolate, tea, coffee, bananas, and supermarkets – all sectors where change is desperately needed when it comes to Workers’ Rights. 

4. Buy from a shop you can ask about standards

Some smaller retailers (like the alternative brands listed in our supermarkets guide) are taking steps to ensure that the products they sell respect workers’ rights. Have a conversation with your local shop to find out what they’re doing. Even if it’s not much, you may help put workers’ rights on their agenda. 

By buying from your local store, you’re also avoiding the supermarket – a good decision when it comes to changing the root causes of many violations. 

5. Pressure the government to improve standards

For real change to happen, our laws need to change. Core Coalition and others are campaigning for “a new law to hold business, finance and the public sector to account when they fail to prevent supply chain human rights abuses and environmental harms.” Sign the petition at corporatejusticecoalition.org/our-campaigns/due-diligence-law/ 

We have many food and drink guides on our website where you can read more about the ethical and environmental issues involved, from biscuits and chocolate, to tea, coffee, rice and bananas.

You can find these from the food and drink menu tab at the top, or via the food and drink section, and some are linked to below.