Proper Gander – Exploitation at work
When we buy a product, it’s easy not to think about the long journey it has made to reach us, through the combined effort of countless people across the world. A cup of tea often starts out in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, where its tea leaves are grown and picked before being sent on for processing and packing. The workers who pick the leaves which eventually end up in our morning cuppa tend to be women living close to poverty. Like many in the primary sector, their work on the tea plantations involves lengthy, repetitive shifts for low pay, made even worse for them by a culture where sexual abuse is common.
This was the focus of a disturbing edition of BBC One’s Panorama: Sex For Work: The True Cost Of Our Tea. The documentary investigated plantations in Kenya owned by two British companies – Unilever and James Finlay & Co – which produce half the tea drunk in the UK, sold under brands such as PG Tips, Lipton and Sainsbury’s Red Label. Researchers interviewed a hundred women tea pickers, and as many as 75 said they had suffered sexual harassment by managers at their workplace.
Heading the programme is journalist Tom Odula, but credit should go to the undercover reporter who put herself at risk by applying for work on the plantations. Much of the documentary comprises footage filmed on a hidden camera by ‘Katie’. This shows that women being pushed into having sex with senior staff is rife, despite the problem being recognised at least as far back as 2011. Then, a report was published by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations about the extent of sexual abuse in Unilever’s operations, which led to them introducing a new ‘zero tolerance’ policy and reporting system. These are put to the test when Katie applies for a job at a Unilever plantation and gets asked by a Divisional Manager, Jeremiah Koskei, to meet in a bar. There, she records him talking about how they could spend the night at his home, following a pattern described by other women seeking work on the plantation. ‘It felt pretty transactional’ says Katie later. Despite rejecting his advances, she gets employed and is assigned the gruelling task of weeding for up to 10 hours a day, at a rate of the equivalent of £25 for a six-day week. When Katie asks for different duties, supervisor Samuel Yebei sees this as an opportunity to pressure her to sleep with him in return. After she resists, he gives up, and five weeks later she hasn’t been moved to a better role. One of the women Odula interviews says that she was in such a desperate situation that she was coerced into having sex with Yebei to keep her job and then contracted HIV. We’re told that one reason Yebei has got away with his behaviour is that he is close to Koskei, but complaints have been dismissed before they even reach them. When Katie reports them both to the company’s sexual harassment officer, instead of looking into the matter he just advises her to protect herself. While the documentary was being made, Unilever sold its tea brands and fields to a venture capital company, now operating as Lipton Teas and Infusions, which has suspended the two managers pending an investigation.
A similar culture was found in plantations owned by James Finlay & Co, whose tea is sold by Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Starbucks. Odula speaks with a woman (already suffering from an injury from her work) who refused to have sex with a manager in order to get a job, and regrets that her daughters didn’t make the same decision. She reported harassment but hasn’t had a response. Many of the women interviewed name John Chebochok, a recruiter for James Finlay & Co, as a predator. Katie goes to meet him for a job interview, which she is told will be held in a hotel room. There, he says he will give her money and a job if she has sex with him, which escalates to him pinning her against a window before he gives up and goes. After three months of undercover reporting, Katie quits the plantations and receives counselling. Finlays later said it suspended and reported Chebochok to the police, and is now investigating whether its operation has ‘an endemic issue with sexual violence’.
Panorama’s report from Kenya recalls exposés of similar practices in other organisations. Women in Haiti in poorly paid jobs making clothes for American brands were pressurised by their managers to have sex or have their contracts ended, according to an article published by the Guardian (23 June). In Congo, more than 50 women alleged that aid workers, including some from the World Health Organisation, had demanded sex from them to get or keep jobs as cooks, cleaners and community workers during an Ebola crisis (Reuters, 29/09/20). As in Kenya, the poverty the women were living in often meant they had little choice.
The hierarchies which are built into the capitalist structures of organisations put people like Chebochok, Yebei and Koskei in positions of power. And the wider economic system makes people – women who rely on wages from any work they can get, in this instance – vulnerable to being used by this predatory type of man for their own gratification. Because these managers are enforcing the exploitation of the women through their employment, they also feel entitled to exploit them sexually. They see and treat the women as objects because the system creates the conditions in which this can happen. Reforms and a shift in culture may eventually lessen the threat of sexual abuse for women such as those on the plantations, but won’t address the root cause of the problem.
MIKE FOSTER
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