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OPINION: Supermarkets spent pandemic profits on shareholders, not workers

by Gabriela Bucher | @Gabucher | Oxfam International
Tuesday, 22 June 2021 12:23 GMT

ARCHIVE PHOTO: A worker wearing a protective mask is seen on duty at a supermarket amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Brussels, Belgium May 26, 2020. REUTERS/Yves Herman

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* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Supermarkets should take their record sales as an opportunity to create a more sustainable and resilient global food supply chain

By Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director of Oxfam International

You may be a woman sorting seafood in Thailand. You may be one of the many key workers keeping the food industry going in challenging circumstances. You may be a shopper at a supermarket such as Walmart, Tesco or Aldi – perhaps one of the many who, like me, was grateful for the chance to see our community while shopping for groceries during lockdown.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us just how interwoven we are as a human family – be it relying on each other to stay safe or realizing that our economies depend on one another.

The global system of food has, too, brought us all together like no other. But it is not a system humanity participates in equally.

Oxfam’s new report – Not In This Together – tells a story of a food system built upon inequality: in which a few winners are being prized at the expense of so many losing out.

Consider the owners of supermarkets – supermarkets that hold outsized influence over global food supply chains, upon which hundreds of millions of people’s livelihoods depends.

Major publicly-listed supermarkets from the Netherlands, UK and US upped their dividend pay-outs to shareholders by an average of 123 percent, from $10 billion in 2019 to $22.3 billion, during the first eight months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These supermarkets, Ahold Delhaize from the Netherlands, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Tesco from the UK, and Albertsons Companies, Costco, Kroger and Walmart from the US, paid out nearly all (an average of 98 percent) of their net profits to owners and shareholders.

We also know that privately-owned food retailers profited hugely from extra sales over this period: including for Aldi North, Aldi South, Lidl, Edeka and Rewe from Germany, or Jumbo and PLUS from the Netherlands.

Now contrast that with the workers and the farmers within the supermarkets’ supply chains across the world, who continued to provide produce and keep supply chains moving. Think particularly of the women who dominate the most insecure and lowest paid jobs andwho saw pervasive and systemic exploitation and their rights continue to be violated.

Chesa, a 32-year-old woman migrant who is a fish filleter in Thailand, told us that during the second COVID-19’s surge she could not afford her accommodation as her income halved and she had to share accommodation with seven other people.

Most workers and farmers interviewed by Oxfam for our report do not earn a living wage or income. Some do not even earn a monthly minimum wage. It would take Chesa more than 5,700 years to earn what the chief executive at a top US supermarket earns on average in a year.

But change is possible. Through our engagement with supermarkets, we have seen important first steps taken by some of them, such as Tesco’s gender policy that outlines specific actions it will take, like increasing formal ways to support women to stand up for their rights in the workplace. Or Walmart’s commitment to sourcing from women-owned businesses. But there remains far more to be done across the sector to improve the lives of women workers.

Our message to supermarkets is to take their record sales as an opportunity to create a more sustainable and resilient global food supply chain – to genuinely put hard policies and action behind respecting women across their supply chains.

Practically that means identifying and tackling human rights violations, including those resulting from COVID-19, and ensure living wages are paid across their supply chains.

It means gaining a full understanding of the roles that women play in their supply chains, and the issues they face – developing comprehensive gender policies to tackle them.

Is it radical to suggest that in age of a billionaire bonanza, workers and farmers should earn enough to not go hungry and live safely?

Regulation is starting to drive change. Gender pay gap legislation in the UK has made companies more aware of their shortcomings. Upcoming national legislation in the Netherlands and Germany will incentivize companies to attract more women into higher positions in their own operations.

Human rights due-diligence legislation is under discussion in Europe, which could provide a legal framework for companies to respect women’s human rights.

We need better public policy: in which governments put a stop to companies paying excessive shareholder pay-outs at the expense of human rights. And we need the right incentives too: that advance the growth of more equitable business models that challenge shareholder domination.

We, too, as consumers must play our part to expose, to lobby and to campaign for real change, that we know supermarkets respond to.

The pandemic has shown us that we must rethink the unjust systems of old anew – systems that we are all a part of. Let it now lead to ending the human suffering behind the food that we find on the supermarket shelf.

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