India Sugar Industry Workers Association: “This is a historic moment, a historic opportunity where the court has pushed to make substantial changes…”
The New York Times: “… [L]abor leaders are also pressuring multinational companies to join a labor-standards program modeled after the Fair Food Program, which has improved conditions for American agricultural workers.”
Over the past several months, The New York Times released a shocking, five-part investigative series into labor conditions in the sugar industry in India, the second largest sugar industry in the world after Brazil. The bombshell report revealed the horrific abuses facing hundreds of thousands of sugarcane workers in India, including tens of thousands of women farmworkers subjected to forced hysterectomies, widespread sexual violence and harassment, and entire families locked in debt bondage arrangements that in some cases stretch across generations.
But through the veil of darkness that envelopes the sugarcane plantations of Maharashtra, India, where much of the sugar industry is concentrated, a bright light of hope shines. In the wake of The New York Times’ series, the Bombay High Court has ruled that many of the exploitative conditions facing workers are illegal, and sweeping changes must be made to bring the industry back into compliance. And while implementation of the ruling is expected to face an uphill battle given the longstanding political power of the sugar industry in India, the High Court’s findings provide much-needed leverage for the India Sugar Industry Workers Association (ISWA), a coalition of grassroots labor organizations representing sugarcane harvesters, and their nascent efforts to create a Worker-driven Social Responsibility (WSR) program based on the groundbreaking success of the Fair Food Program to enforce their rights in the fields.
Specifically, the finding increases the pressure on large sugar buyers like Coca-Cola and Pepsi — singled out in the latest NYT article in the series (see below), and already facing growing demands for real, demonstrable human rights due diligence in their supply chains from consumers and European Union regulators alike — to support a worker-driven social responsibility program in India. Their participation would provide the market power needed to bring India’s largest sugar growers to join the FFP-like program and help usher in a new day of human rights to an industry long plagued by abuse.
In recent months, the Fair Food Program has partnered with ISWA to explore the development of a new WSR program by and for sugar workers in India — based on the FFP’s unique mix of monitoring and enforcement mechanisms — to ensure the implementation of the same gold standard human rights protections currently enjoyed by farmworkers in the FFP. Partnerships between the Fair Food Program and other human rights and worker organizations around the world are becoming more common in recent years, as the WSR model emerges as the new paradigm for workers to guarantee their own rights and dignity in global supply chains. You can read more about WSR’s growing global footprint here!
The collaboration between agricultural workers in the US and sugarcane harvesters in India embodies the immense promise of WSR, and provides a rare reason for hope in an otherwise increasingly troubled world. We are excited to share the final article in the Time’s investigative series, which we have included an excerpt of below. To read it on The New York Times’ website, click here.
