Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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The US-based nonprofits Fair Trade USA and Equitable Food Initiative (EFI) claim to prevent abuses by setting private labor standards for their labels. These standards are set through a process that includes feedback from the brands, growers, and nonprofits — as well as, in the case of EFI, US farmworker unions. Growers and other suppliers pay for audits to assess whether they’re in compliance with the standards. Brands then pay licensing fees to put labels like “Fair Trade Certified” on their products. The idea is that people can support fair labor practices when they shop.
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Both Fair Trade USA and EFI certifications assess compliance through third-party social auditors who visit plantation sites and interview workers. The audit is set up to deliver good results, with focus-group-style interviews in front of management. “Yes, they ask us a lot of questions,” Lucinda said, “but we can’t say the truth there, because the coordinator is there. The human resources person is there. “Before they [the auditors] come, they tell us ‘We have to go over this, and when they come we have to tell them yes.’ In other words, they instruct us to lie, and really we aren’t really complying.”
✏️ The audits are rigged from the start, because the power dynamics dictate that the workers can’t safely tell the truth. It’s just performative. 🔗 View Highlight
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While the certification model has become quite common as a tactic to address both environmental and social issues in supply chains, it is increasingly criticized as a “soft” strategy that stymies the organizing of independent unions. Certifications do this by channeling workers’ efforts into ineffective management-controlled committees and promoting token financial incentives — incentives that, as one worker put it, “put blinders on the mule to keep it working.”
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certifications help corporations rebrand the exploitative status quo and undermine the organizing that it would take to win real improvements for workers. As one worker, Raul, put it, “To me, Fair Trade means unfair trade.”