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Starbucks: slave and child labour found at certified coffee farms in Minas Gerais
(reporterbrasil.org.br)
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Starbucks will not have wanted to be using slaves, they only pay the workers 2¢ on the cup anyway. It is a fairly minor expense in the greater scheme of things.
What it is, is an emergent risk in extended labour chains (or "cascades"). Particularly prevalent in harvest work. At some point your supply chain transparency breaks down, how ever many steps of outsourcing deep that might be.
Unsurprisingly the gangmaster not actually paying his workers is likely the lowest bidder, so in the cruellest sense of the "free" market, every company wants to use slave labour. But to a global business with at least some accountability, this is a massive fuck up in oversight.
You could think of it as stochastic slave trading, if you wanted to over-intellectualise it. Certainly oligopsonies generate market pressures that strongly incentivise the emergence of modern slavery and labour abuse in the supply chain.
This is just apologia for Starbucks' core capitalist nature.
No? If you restricted your purchasing to people growing coffee in specific areas with a high degree of oversight and frequent audits, this wouldn't happen. The coffee would cost (them) a lot more, of course, but it's certainly possible to do this.
The point is an oligarchy could incentivize high worker wages and ethical business practices through lots of mechanisms, the primary one being "pay more money for your supplies." They don't. We should be burying all these companies in the grave.
Yeah, no it isn't. If anything it's an indictment of that nature. However it is a mechanistic explanation of how these conditions emerge in supposedly legitimate supply chains. It's very common, unfortunately.
You're correct that the largest purchasers of certain high-value crops can use their stranglehold to improve conditions; a lot of them claim to do so and use this in their own media campaigns. That's why this is such a fuck-up for a company like Starbucks versus, say, a small Scottish berry farm.