How you can make a difference to tea workers’ lives as a tea company

Check how your company is doing on human rights

THIRST combines expert knowledge of the tea sector with extensive experience in the field of human rights in global supply chains (THIRST is a member of the Ethical Trading Initiative). This means that we can help tea companies to better understand their human rights obligations as well as how best to honour them. This is particularly important with upcoming EU legislation around mandatory Human Rights and Environmental Due Diligence and Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting Directive, as well as growing national legislation on human rights of supply chain workers.

Review your purchasing practices

The way that companies buy made tea and sell it on can have a significant impact on tea producers’ ability to provide their workers with wages and living conditions that meet human rights standards.

Here are some ways your company can help them ensure that the human rights of their workers are realised

• Develop a genuine partnership with your suppliers
• Find out what support they need in order to operate ethically, and provide it as far as you can
• Pay a price that enables them to improve wages and conditions (sometimes called the ‘cost of sustainable production’)
• Offer longer term contracts to help them to plan for the future and develop longer term strategies to improve workers’ lives
• Encourage other buyers to do the same

It is important for each company to play its part. According to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, companies should take responsibility for respecting human rights throughout their supply chains, and there is increasing legislation mandating human rights due diligence in global supply chains.

Plus, it’s always good to know that you are doing the right thing.

Collaborate for change

There are, of course, many other factors that may be preventing workers and farmers from realising their human rights. As THIRST’s human rights impact assessment has demonstrated, the drivers of human rights breaches are systemic in nature.

This means that there are limits to what an individual company can acheive on its own, however committed it may be to improving the lives of the workers in its tea supply chain. One company offering higher prices for tea can help a little, but if the price of all tea meets the cost of sustainable production, suppliers will have a much better chance of being able to improve their workers’ and farmers’ living and working conditions.

Factors like government policy, lack of transparency, unhealthy competition, trading systems and power imbalances conspire to keep workers’ wages and farmers’ incomes down. It is only through sustained, concerted, collaborative effort that these systemic issues that affect the whole of the industry will be addressed.

Tea companies can take inspiration from initiatives such as ACT on Living Wages which involves a group of major garment brands collaborating to achieve living wages in their sector. Examples of such collaboration within the tea sector include IDH’s Roadmap on Living Wages. THIRST is working with a small number of tea companies to explore further collaboration opportunities.