Page 3165 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 August 2005
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to be healthier for the community over the long term. Environmental sustainability is the key to this. Indigenous populations have a deep connection to their land, and often they have had to change from a subsistence lifestyle to a cash-crop approach. Fair trade gives those communities an opportunity to determine for themselves the kind of community they would like, in the context of bringing in an income sufficient to ensure that the whole community can support itself in a sustainable way.
What does fair trade mean? It means fair pay, good working conditions and the right to unionise. Many fair trade communities have established workers’ cooperatives to give workers a decisive say in the production methods and a fair share in the profits. A workers’ cooperative is an interesting structure because it is an alternative to the full profit structure based upon standard democratic principles. Here, we have become very used to the partnership, the sole trader and the company. The cooperative is a method often used in Third World countries and certainly in alternative societies. It is not designed to maximise profits or returns to investors, but rather to bring to the workplace many of the rights and responsibilities that we have as citizens in our communities.
These principles include one-person, one-vote, open access to information—that is, open book management—free speech and the equitable distribution of resources such as incomes. These are not features of the multinational companies that benefit from the free trade and rely on cheap labour to make the highest profit. Many of us might think that child slave labour is an issue from the past but that is not true. Slave labour is a serious issue because stopping the cycle that causes it is very difficult. Many countries in the world have child slave labour simply because of the immense poverty and the need to make money.
Much of what we buy could in fact be harvested, made or crafted by children from Third World nations. Many people do not realise that some of the items we have at home and use daily are imported and therefore potentially at the risk of being made by slave or child labour. Slave labour is so close to home that you can taste it, maybe you are wearing something, whether it be clothing or shoes. More than 90 per cent of all cocoa from the Ivory Coast in Africa is procured with the help of child labour. Many children begin working at a young age, which prohibits them from getting an education that would stop the cycle of illiteracy and poverty. These types of conditions are taken advantage of for trafficking children, not just for sex purposes but as cheap and free labour.
Cacao prices are very low and, as long as they are kept low, corporate prices are high. Some plantations use this as an excuse for slavery. Many companies try to avoid slave chocolate. However, the five largest manufacturers, Nestle, Mars, Hershey, Cadbury and Phillip Morris—yes, they do make chocolate—do not. They claim they have no control over the problem, which is not true. The only way they will learn is if we avoid their products. There are a number of examples of industries around the globe that are renowned for the exploitation of workers. We know that garment and shoe companies in Australia and elsewhere rely on sweated labour. It is a global campaign that has brought the working conditions of Nike workers, for instance, to light and has put pressure on Nike to improve workers’ conditions. But they have also opened market niches for the fair trade companies, which produce similar products in fully unionised factories in safe and fair conditions.
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