What should I do?
Join our Who Pays? campaign. The Government can bring in binding regulation to make UK supermarkets clean up their act. You can influence them. Join Target Poverty and we will help you take regular action that leads to change for supermarket workers in developing countries.
Shop smart! Consumer pressure helps lead to change as well. Buy fairtrade certified products where you can.
Would the price of my weekly shop to go up?
Don’t worry, if our campaign is successful, the cost of your weekly shop won’t double! Supermarkets can easily make sure workers and suppliers are paid properly and treated fairly without raising prices. For example, Sainsbury's recently decided to make all its bananas fairtrade. They did this without raising the price for consumers. However, this is one product out of tens of thousands that supermarkets sell, so regulation would help this happen across the board.
In some cases prices may need to go up a little. It’s hard to see how supermarkets can sell jeans for £3 a pair and ensure workers in Bangladesh get a fair wage, for example. But, if workers' wages were doubled, making a massive difference to their lives, and supermarkets passed on the extra cost to shoppers, we would still only pay £3.09 for the jeans.
Are you asking us to boycott supermarkets or the products featured in your case studies?
No. And you shouldn’t feel guilty for shopping there. Half of us do every week and some people have no choice but to do so. ActionAid does not believe boycotts are the way to address the issue. The problems we've highlighted are present within so many supply chains that it would be impractical to boycott any one item. For every tale of malpractice told, dozens more lie unearthed. Boycotting a particular product sourced unethically does not benefit the workers who produced the goods, and in fact could harm them if they lose their job. These problems are present across the supermarket sector – that’s why we're campaigning to raise the ethical bar within all supermarket supply chains with better regulation.
Where should I shop? Are any of the supermarkets better than others?
ActionAid is not asking anyone to boycott any supermarkets. Actually, being a supermarket customer puts you in a powerful position to campaign for change – asking the government and supermarkets to do more. That said shopping locally (if possible) will help revive your local area as well as reduce climate changing gases.
Does buying fairtrade help?
Fairtrade certainly does help producers and workers in developing countries as they receive a fairer price for their products, especially when it is not 'controlled' by large companies. The ideal is to buy your fairtrade in a local shop. Increasingly, supermarkets are sourcing and verifying their own fairtrade. Producers working with ActionAid have said this is a worrying trend because they are losing control and coming increasingly under the influence of supermarket's (often unfair) business practices. Also, fairtrade makes up less than 0.2% of goods sold in the UK, so ActionAid does not campaign or work on fairtrade products but focuses on the 99% of trade that is still unfair. We are campaigning to ensure that all trade is fair.