Cleaning up abuses in the tea sector

Earlier this week, a BBC Panorama documentary broadcast shocking revelations  about sexual harassment and abuse on British-owned tea farms in Kenya.

The programme, which included footage of bosses at tea estates pressuring an undercover reporter who was posing as  a tea worker for sex, stated that more than 70 women working on Kenyan tea farms had told the BBC that they had been sexually abused.   

The programme was deeply disturbing to watch but the sad truth is that the revelations the BBC made were not surprising.

The power imbalance between those offering jobs in labour-intensive sectors such as tea, and the huge numbers of people worldwide who are desperate to find work in them, all too often leads to abusive treatment.

At its worst, this can include the kind of sexual abuse revealed in the BBC programme, but it also includes many other forms of mistreatment including bullying,  poverty pay, or loan arrangements which effectively subject workers to forced labour.

So what can be done? Clearly, when crimes are committed, the criminal justice system of the countries in question must actively investigate and bring perpetrators to justice. But international brands also have a key role to play.

An important part of the solution lies in greater transparency.  Where larger clothing retailers and brands regularly publish the names of their manufacturing sites, this is still not the case with the tea brands. And although, in response to our 2018 campaign Who Picked My Tea?,  a handful of tea brands took a positive step forward by publishing their supplier list, many others still don’t. All tea brands need to take this step and commit to updating this information regularly; otherwise, claims that their tea is ‘ethically sourced’ are impossible to verify.

In addition, tea brands need to prove that they are serious about protecting and being accountable to the workers in their supply chain.  As well as publishing the names of the tea estates and factories that they buy from, they need also to set up a system for workers to lodge complaints via an email address that can be shared in tea growing areas. This would enable workers and workers associations to go direct to the international brand to report treatment which breaches its codes of conduct. 

These seemingly small changes are steps that we and our partners will continue to call for, as they would make a major contribution to cleaning up abuses in the tea sector.