Children have picked ingredients used by suppliers to two major beauty companies, the BBC can reveal.
A BBC investigation into last summer’s perfume supply chains found jasmine used by Lancôme and Aerin Beauty’s suppliers was picked by minors.
All the luxury perfume brands claim to have zero tolerance on child labour.
L’Oréal, Lancôme’s owner, said it was committed to respecting human rights. Estée Lauder, Aerin Beauty’s owner, said it had contacted its suppliers.
The jasmine used in Lancôme Idôle L’Intense - and Ikat Jasmine and Limone Di Sicilia for Aerin Beauty - comes from Egypt, which produces about half the world’s supply of jasmine flowers - a key perfume ingredient.
Industry insiders told us the handful of companies that own many luxury brands are squeezing budgets, resulting in very low pay. Egyptian jasmine pickers say this forces them to involve their children.
Perfume, clothing, chocolate, electronics… it’s all using child labor. There’s no way to get away from it. There’s child labor all over the supply chain.
And nothing will be done about it in our lifetimes, I would wager.
It is in the supply chain, but there is something on the horizon:
EU - CS3D
This is an actual EU regulation with some very good parts in it. This surely wont solve everything, but it creates precedent and can be given more teeth to bit with in the future.
There are two types of child labor though. One is sending children down the mines, or using their ‘tiny nimble hands’ on looms, and the other is very traditional your kids help out on the farm.
Broad legislation like this tends to hurt the second type, and can make poverty worse.
When I worked in Asia it was normal for the kids to miss 4-5 days of school at rice planting season, and another week at harvest. This was smallholder stuff, but in a good season you sold the excess.
It’s a pretty complex issue especially when many commodities are primarily farmed by smallholders, then capitalized by corporations.
Even small production Fair trade chocolate almost certainly employed children. They were the kids of the farm owners.
Not with that attitude. I’m kidding, but not totally. Consumers and voters need to demand better. Fatalism helps no one.
I don’t want to be fatalistic, but I honestly do not know how consumers would realistically be able remove child labor from the global supply chain. I don’t think companies are even able to do that. Because it’s not necessarily them doing the child labor, it’s the people who sell the stuff that is made to sell to another company which assembles it to the final company which can credibly say it doesn’t use child labor because it’s two steps from that. How do you fix that?
It’s not a trivial problem, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable for the multinational corporations that actually care. If journalists can uncover this kind of thing without any inside information, corporations can do it too. And if consumers care enough, the corporations will care.
Here’s a toolkit from the US Department of Labor:
I honestly do not believe that is true at this point. Corporations that lose money just get bought up by private equity firms and bled dry, so they do anything they possibly can to cut corners. Either way, the C-suite execs have a golden parachute. They’re just too powerful. We would need a complete societal shift for something like this and that’s asking a lot. I would love for it to happen, but I just don’t see it happening in my lifetime except in some sort of really horrible way like everything collapses.
I agree that this another reason we need vigorous antitrust enforcement.
How do you achieve that globally?
Let’s start at home.
Sure, try all you want. I’m just saying you’ll never get child labor out of the supply chain without a global societal shift. You might be able to lessen it, but you won’t get it out of the supply chain. Lessening it isn’t bad, just don’t expect it to be gone.
Manmade diamonds are cruelty free, that’s why they’re so cheap, gotta pay for that child/slave labour
Are they though? Is all the equipment used to synthesize the diamonds made without conflict minerals?
This is what I mean, it’s all over the supply chain. The best you can say this that synthetic diamonds are not cruel on the level of mined diamonds.
Woooooooooosh…
Please re read the last line…