Slave labour on coffee farms denounced at the OECD

Nestlé, McDonald’s, Starbucks and three other large transnational companies are accused of lack of transparency and of flaws in production line monitoring.

15/05/2017- Mato Grosso- MT- Brazil- PRÓ CAFÉ MATO GROSSO aims to foster and strengthen the coffee production line in the North and North-eastern regions of the state as a sustainable alternative for generating income in order to limit deforestation in municipalities. A three-pronged programme aims to achieve this objective: increased production and productivity and higher quality café through the spread of good practice in the production of seedlings, planting, cultivation and treatment, harvesting, post-harvesting and processing.

One way of telling the story of labour and human rights violations on the coffee farms in the South of Minas, starts in Tanhaçu, in Bahia, where every year, the so-called ‘gatos’ mediate the hiring process and lure workers who will be sent, under precarious conditions, to the four corners of the state of Minas Gerais, where they will work in insalubrious conditions on the harvest of one of Brazil’s principal exportation products.

The country currently produces around one third of the worldwide output of coffee beans. The south and south-eastern regions of Minas Gerais meet half this demand, making the state the biggest coffee producer in the country. Over 28 million sacks of coffee are produced there every year, which is the equivalent to almost 1.7 thousand tonnes. The cost of a part of this production is systematic violations, including contemporary forms of slavery, like debt bondage and degrading working conditions. These were identified on 17 farms during inspections over the last four years.

Violations related in testimonies made by 37 workers rescued from the farms, corroborated by infraction reports and Ministry of Labour inspection reports, make up the denouncement registered on 21 August by Conectas and ADERE-MG (State of Minas Gerais Rural Employees’ Group) together with the PCN (National Contact Point) of Brazil for the OECD (The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) for multinational companies. The PCN is an apparatus made up of representatives from a number of public bodies that are dedicated to implementing and raising awareness of OECD guidelines – a set of norms aimed at bringing greater responsibility to business conduct. The PCN has the role of receiving denouncements of violations for multinational companies and starting the process of mediation to verify whether guidelines are being followed.

The denouncement was received from ADERE-MG, an organisation that is the voice of a number of rural trade unions in the state. The farms in question are involved in product supply chains for the multinationals Nestlé, Jacobs Douwe Egberts, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks and Illy. Slave-like working conditions – precarious living conditions, food shortages, lack of hygiene in lodgings and common areas, absence of personal protection equipment, irregular hiring and payment – were among the recurring violations.

“Brazil has a commitment to comply with OECD guidelines for multinational companies. These clearly stipulate the corporate duty to respect human rights. Companies in the coffee sector, like all corporate players, must conduct due diligence to identify, prevent and remedy human rights violations in which they are involved, including in their supply chains.” Said Caio Borges, Coordinator of Development and Socio-Environmental Rights at Conectas. “By failing to establish robust mechanisms to track and monitor the supply chain, as well as failing to participate in victim compensation processes, coffee brands could find themselves in violation of international human rights standards for responsible business conduct, like OECD guidelines and UN guiding principles.” Borges added.

The denouncement also presents the efforts of companies and producers to build guidelines for social responsibility, codes of conduct and ethics, as well as certification of the coffee supply chain. Despite these initiatives of social responsibility, organisations state that, with regards to violations, purchasing companies still lack transparency and fail to implement mechanisms for periodic checks.

From Bahia to South of Minas, from promises to violations

In Tanhaçu, ‘gatos’ promise work, official documentation, good accommodation and proper payment. Every year hundreds of workers are convinced by these offers and board clandestine buses, headed for the south of Minas Gerais. At the final destination, complaints about false promises multiply. In one case, a worker had even called the farm he was destined for and accepted the offer only after they had confirmed the conditions.

“So I phoned and asked him how it was: it’s like this and that and everything – all ok. I was going to sign up and we agreed it would be all proper, like in the law. Just that when we got there, it was completely different from what he’d said …. Accommodation, lots of things, everything the opposite! So we worked for a bit and nothing he’d promised ever happened.” 

(Testimony given during a listening workshop for workers on slave labour on the coffee plantations in Minas Gerais, Sussuarana, Tanhacu, Bahia, 11 May 2018)

Conditions on the farms are quite different from what is promised. Few of the lodgings had running water and in some cases, there were not even any beds or toilets. In their testimonies, workers describe conditions as like ‘living in a corral’, with poor sanitation, in precarious structures that were not enough to meet even the most basic needs for dignified survival.

On one of the farms where Ministry of Labour inspectors rescued people held in slavery-like conditions, hunger was commonplace. When their food stocks ran out and as they were not being paid, workers had to eat leftover rice and papaya picked on the farm.

“We went hungry, because they didn’t pay and they didn’t register us either. So we were stuck there. If those people hadn’t got us out we would have stayed there for ages.”

(Testimony given during a listening workshop for workers on slave labour on the coffee plantations in Minas Gerais, Sussuarana, Tanhacu, Bahia, 11 May 2018)

Exhausting working days also figure in the testimonies and in infraction reports made by inspectors. The working day starts at 4am with a long walk to the place where harvesting takes place and goes on into the night. Painful hands and backache, as well as fatigue are recurrent and continual. On some farms, basic personal protection equipment, such as gloves and goggles, were not provided, which increased health risks to workers from both the machinery involved in harvesting but also from prolonged exposure to pesticides.

Workers are paid according to the number of sacks of coffee they harvest. The agreed sum is not always paid in full and it is evident that there is often fraud in counting the sacks. In addition to these violations, there are records of cases where Record of Employment booklets have been retained and also where people under the ages of 18 and 16 are being employed.

The role of multinational companies

The denouncement presented to the OECD is classified by the UN Guiding Principles on Companies and Human Rights, that describes the degree to which a company is involved with human rights violations based on three categories: cause, contribution and being directly related. The highest level of company responsibility is when it ‘causes’ a violation. Followed by those in ‘contributory’ relationships. Finally, ‘direct relationship’ is the lowest level of responsibility of the three forms of involvement.

Illy, Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s are directly related to violations through their commercial involvement with companies that practice violations linked to products, operations and services. These three multinationals acquire coffee via the Canadian distributor Mother Parkers which, in turn, buys coffee at the Cooxupé Cooperative. The production chain is as follows: Cooxupé buys coffee from another cooperative, Cocatrel, that has commercial relations with a producer whose name is on the black list for slave labour.

When contacted by Conectas, McDonald’s, Illy and Dunkin’ Donuts did not respond to the organisation’s questions regarding the transparency of its links to companies that violate rights nor to the fact that farms cited in denouncements continue to appear on their list of suppliers.

Nestlé and Jacob Douwe Egberts, have contributory links. Starbucks has both direct and contributory links. Nestlé is a signatory of the National Pact for the Eradication of Slave Labour and informed that, currently 85% of its Brazilian Arabic coffee reserves are acquired by responsible companies, who have a certificate of origin for independent companies or Nestlé’s sustainability programme.

Even so, in 2016, the Dutch organisation Danwatch discovered that Nestlé was buying coffee from farms where beans were harvested under slave-like conditions. When contacted by Conectas, Nestlé informed that “it does not tolerate violations of workers’ rights, which includes forced labour and/or slave-like labour”, but failed to respond to specific questions regarding transparency in its production chain and its links with farms that violate rights.

In the same period, Danwatch also showed that Jacob Douwe Egberts had purchased, coffee harvested by people working in slave-like conditions, through a middleman. Conectas contacted the multinational who said that they work “actively with governments, non-governmental organisations, suppliers, agricultural cooperatives and the whole coffee supply chain in order to improve working conditions on the coffee plantations of Brazil and around the world”.

Starbucks, in turn, also admitted having purchased coffee from the Cooxupé cooperative, but showed that the coffee had not been harvested on farms that violated rights. However, this year, 18 workers were rescued from one of the farms certified by Starbucks. They had been exposed to degrading working conditions.