A Guardian investigation has found workers in France’s champagne industry are being underpaid and forced to sleep on the streets and steal food to stave off hunger.
Workers from west Africa and eastern Europe in the town of Épernay, home to the headquarters of some of the world’s most expensive champagne brands, including Moët & Chandon and Mercier, claim that they are either not being paid for their work or illegally underpaid by vineyards near the town.
The Guardian found workers in the town sleeping on the streets or in tents as the vineyards did not provide accommodation. Other workers staying in a nearby village said they had been forced to steal food from local people as they did not have anywhere to buy provisions.
Yet the champagne industry has been hit by a string of controversies related to its treatment of grape-pickers, with four workers dying from suspected sunstroke during last year’s harvest. In a case scheduled to go to court early next year, four people, including a vineyard owner, have been charged with human trafficking.
Fixing this problem requires more redistribution of wealth than degrowth. Workers should be paid appropriately for their work, and those at the top should get a smaller slice of the pie.
Capitalism which means that business owners are free to make billions yet those who produce the goods go hungry, is utterly intolerable.
I guess my point was that the only way first-world countries can live in such excess is by massive exploitation of the world’s poor. Resources are massively unevenly distributed worldwide, and first-world countries are using like three times more resources than they actually need to, if not more. There are so many people in such abject poverty that real redistribution will mean people like you and me living with less, too.
Redistribution will have to happen, but I think for it to work we’ll all have to accept some limitations and a lot less “fun” extra stuff in our lives.
Absolutely. This is a tough pill to swallow for most first-worlders, because they don’t want to acknowledge they’re a part of the problem.
The closer we get to the roots of a problem, the more people we’ll find that contribute to it and the fewer we’ll find that are willing to admit it.
Fair enough - you’re not completely wrong, looking at it from a wider perspective.
I can’t see that ever happening however - the majority of relatively wealthy people are unlikely to ever accept a reduction in their wealth even if it solves climate change, world hunger, whatever.
People want to see an easy solution that doesn’t affect them directly. Much more likely is the rise of the far right, riots, etc.