Fair Trade Workers

Fair trade is a movement and a market that is intended to provide sustainably produced goods that workers were compensated for with a fair price or living wage. While fair trade certification schemes started as a solidarity exercise between organized farmers or artisans in Latin America and nongovernmental organizations, importers, and retailers in the United States and Western Europe, it has grown to support workers in agriculture, textiles, and other handicrafts globally. In tandem with this growth was the creation and establishment of international third-party certifiers, centrally located in the United States and Western Europe, with satellite certifiers in other areas of the world. These third-party certifiers develop standards for production that must be met in order to obtain certified status. Generally, it is not the workers who apply for and receive certification, but the producer cooperatives, plantation owners, or businesses that become certified. However, the burden is on the workers to maintain the practices set out in the standards, and an annual audit by third-party certifiers determines compliance. Fair trade workers can be found all over the globe, but they live predominantly in the global periphery—in countries that are former colonies. Workers in the fair trade marketplace produce primary, secondary, and finished goods at multiple sites and scales. For agricultural primary products like coffee, cacao, bananas, cotton, and mangos, production happens at both the small-scale, such as shade coffee plots, and the large-scale, such as full-sun coffee plantations. The third-party certification standards for labor differ between these two sites and scales and between the third-party certifiers; however, one commonality is that the major international certifiers prohibit workers under the age of fifteen from participating in production. Coffee was the first fair trade certified product and remains among the topmost traded products in the fair trade marketplace, making it the subject of much early and continued scholarship on fair trade. Research in fair trade is undertaken by a wide variety of scholars in varied disciplinary contexts, including (but not limited to), anthropology, business, community studies, development studies, environmental studies, food studies, geography, marketing, sociology, and others.