Labor

Debt Slavery 

Coffee is such a valuable resource in today’s world, and companies are constantly looking to cut the price that they pay for coffee beans. Large coffee plantations can offer the lowest prices for coffee and a huge reason why is that many coffee plantations essentially rely on slave labor to work their farms. This kind of enslavement is seen in the form of debt bondage, so not quite the same kind of slavery that comes to our mind.

Large plantation owners have estate shops that will provide basically every necessity of  life to it’s workers, but at outrageous prices. Since workers tend to live in impoverished countries, a lot of times wealthy plantation owners are some of the only people that can provide many of the comforts of living; such as food, clean water, and clothing. Since most workers can’t afford to pay for these items, they instead exchange their labor.

Workers will rarely receive pay for their work, and instead they have to take advances on items they need for their families and themselves to survive. Workers are forced to continuously work in order to survive, and it ends up being a never ending cycle. This cycle takes advantage of people in economically impaired countries and it forces them to work long hours doing physically straining jobs just for food and clothes.

Child Slavery 

Small family owned coffee farms are forced to try and keep up with these larger plantations. With smaller amounts of land and less assets to their name, small coffee operations will usually have to charge higher prices for their produce. Since companies are opting to go with larger farms that give them a better price, smaller operations tend to be out of luck. Farm owners try to cut costs wherever they can, mostly in the form of child labor. These farmers usually force their own kids to work, with no pay, in order to help improve their profit margins. The kids are not only being forced to work without compensation, they are also missing out on opportunities such as education. This greatly hurts the children’s ability to rise up in the world, and often times what happens is these kids are stuck farming their whole lives and eventually own the farm themselves, or go on to work for a larger coffee plantation.