The hubris of ‘Fair trade’, the risks of immigration

nick cowen, 23 May 2007

This morning, Radio 4’s Today programme aired a shocking report on the poor treatment of employees (mostly Polish immigrants) in a banana packing factory. Workers had to accept long hours or face being unemployed. Their breaks would be cancelled if the managers felt they had not packed enough boxes. In the most extreme example, a pregnant woman with a doctor’s note was refused a less labour intensive job and, as a consequence, miscarried. Ironically, the bananas these workers park are marked ‘fair trade’ in many major supermarkets.
The first problem this highlights is the continuing difficulty of the fair trade brand. The complex journey that products embark on, from the raw resource to the processed goods on the shop shelves tend to involve a great many different types of workers in many different environments. Fair trade goods have frequently come under fire for having only one or two stages in the production process be conducted ‘fairly’ and yet still be officially sanctioned as fair trade. The other problem is that farmers and traders in the Third World become behoven to an unwieldy bureaucracy to ensure they receive a ‘fair price’ for their goods when, in fact, many of these workers could flourish with simple free trade under the right political conditions.
It seems that this issue has become even more fraught now that unfettered immigration is allowing working conditions to disintegrate in some sectors of the economy. The problem is a combination of newly arrived immigrants who are very willing to work intensively for long hours (an admirable quality in itself) and unscrupulous recruitment agencies whose tactics blur the line between ‘robust’ employment practices and defrauding workers who are not yet aware of their rights and duties in British society. This is the dark side of all those claims that immigrants are the main drive in growing British GDP (claims that remain highly disputable). No one can deny that immigrants can to contribute keeping down the price of ‘fair trade’ bananas to ease consumers’ consciences that bit more cheaply. But at what cost to the wages and working condition of unskilled employment in the UK?