Children have picked ingredients used by suppliers to two major beauty companies, the BBC can reveal.
A BBC investigation into last summer’s perfume supply chains found jasmine used by Lancôme and Aerin Beauty’s suppliers was picked by minors.
All the luxury perfume brands claim to have zero tolerance on child labour.
L’Oréal, Lancôme’s owner, said it was committed to respecting human rights. Estée Lauder, Aerin Beauty’s owner, said it had contacted its suppliers.
The jasmine used in Lancôme Idôle L’Intense - and Ikat Jasmine and Limone Di Sicilia for Aerin Beauty - comes from Egypt, which produces about half the world’s supply of jasmine flowers - a key perfume ingredient.
Industry insiders told us the handful of companies that own many luxury brands are squeezing budgets, resulting in very low pay. Egyptian jasmine pickers say this forces them to involve their children.
I don’t want to be fatalistic, but I honestly do not know how consumers would realistically be able remove child labor from the global supply chain. I don’t think companies are even able to do that. Because it’s not necessarily them doing the child labor, it’s the people who sell the stuff that is made to sell to another company which assembles it to the final company which can credibly say it doesn’t use child labor because it’s two steps from that. How do you fix that?
It’s not a trivial problem, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable for the multinational corporations that actually care. If journalists can uncover this kind of thing without any inside information, corporations can do it too. And if consumers care enough, the corporations will care.
Here’s a toolkit from the US Department of Labor:
Child and forced labor in supply chains present serious and material risks to companies and industries. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Comply Chain tool helps companies mitigate these risks by building or improving worker-driven social compliance systems, which empower workers to play a central role in identifying and addressing labor rights violations and other concerns within their workplaces.
And if consumers care enough, the corporations will care.
I honestly do not believe that is true at this point. Corporations that lose money just get bought up by private equity firms and bled dry, so they do anything they possibly can to cut corners. Either way, the C-suite execs have a golden parachute. They’re just too powerful. We would need a complete societal shift for something like this and that’s asking a lot. I would love for it to happen, but I just don’t see it happening in my lifetime except in some sort of really horrible way like everything collapses.
