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.
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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.
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:
Child and forced labor in supply chains present serious and material risks to companies and industries. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Comply Chain tool helps companies mitigate these risks by building or improving worker-driven social compliance systems, which empower workers to play a central role in identifying and addressing labor rights violations and other concerns within their workplaces.
And if consumers care enough, the corporations will care.
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.
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…
Stop buying stuff. Eat local food. Be active in your community.
Yes, and an easy way to start is just to stop buying as many prepared things. Buy more commodities where they can’t jack up the price. You can make your own perfume, just like you can make your own food. It takes some time but saves you money.
yea dude no shit. all the certificates and ethical labeling are bullshit anyone can pay for the certificates or source from someone without visiting the factory. sending orders out happens all the time. the brands often have no knowledge of how anything is done.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, said he was disturbed by the BBC’s evidence, which includes undercover filming in Egyptian jasmine fields during last year’s picking season.
Once the jasmine has been picked and weighed, it is transferred via collection points to one of several local factories which extract oil from the flowers - the main three being A Fakhry and Co, Hashem Brothers and Machalico.
Lawyer Sarah Dadush, founder of the Responsible Contracting Project, which seeks to improve human rights in global supply chains, said the BBC’s investigation “reveals… that those systems aren’t working”.
Givaudan, the fragrance house which makes Lancôme Idôle L’Intense, described our investigation as “deeply alarming”, adding “it’s incumbent upon us all to continue taking action to remove the risk of child labour entirely”.
L’Oréal said it was “actively committed to respecting the most protective internationally recognised human rights standards”, adding that it "never request[s] Fragrance Houses to go lower than the market price for ingredients at the expense of farmers.
We recognise the complex socio-economic environment surrounding the local jasmine supply chain, and we are taking action to gain better transparency and to work toward improving the livelihoods of sourcing communities."
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