"Champagne's sordid secret: the homeless and hungry migrants picking grapes for France's luxury winemakers,"

A Guardian investigation has found that workers in France’s champagne industry are being underpaid and forced to sleep on the streets and steal food to stave off hunger. Workers from west Africa and eastern Europe in the town of Épernay, home to the headquarters of some of the world’s most expensive champagne brands, including Moët & Chandon and Mercier, claim that they are either not being paid for their work or illegally underpaid by vineyards near the town.

The Guardian found workers in the town sleeping on the streets or in tents as the vineyards did not provide accommodation. Other workers staying in a nearby village said they had been forced to steal food from local people as they did not have anywhere to buy provisions...

Unions blame vineyards for continuing to blindly accept cheap labour and the sector as a whole for failing to ban exploitative labour providers. They say some vineyard owners try to justify themselves by arguing that they are “helping African migrants” by giving them employment, even if it is underpaid...

Unions said conditions were going backwards in the champagne sector and that labour providers offered poor conditions and low pay because of winegrowers’ insistence on cheap labour. But it is hard to hold specific champagne houses responsible for the exploitation of workers, says Blanco, because of a system of “Russian dolls” where you have “one company delegating to another and so on”.

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