Three promises Lidl has made to protect its food workers, 23 April 2020

…Even before Coronavirus, Oxfam research highlighted workers’ vulnerability, earning low wages on insecure contracts, often with poor sick pay and hygiene arrangements. In 2018, we launched the Behind the Barcodes campaign to get major supermarkets to take responsibility for ending human suffering in their food supply chains. The issues raised by the campaign have become starker in the context of the current global pandemic…

One of the major supermarket players is Lidl. With 10,000 stores in 32 countries in Europe and North America, Lidl has significant power to tackle the human suffering behind our food.

Unfortunately, Lidl scored poorly on Oxfam’s Supermarket Scorecard, which  assesses 16 powerful supermarkets on four themes: Transparency, Workers, Farmer and Women, generating national rankings for the UK, Germany, Netherlands and the US. Lidl was bottom of the UK scorecard and close to the bottom of the German and Dutch scorecards. A series of public actions followed as part of Oxfam’s Behind the Barcodes campaign. 20,000 people in the UK and 18,000 in the Netherlands signed a petition (now closed) asking Lidl to do more to protect the people behind its food…

Oxfam, therefore, welcomes the new human rights policy Lidl has published, to protect the wellbeing of workers in its supply chain. This represents an important step in the right direction, especially concerning one of the four pillars on the Behind the Barcodes scorecard: workers’ rights…

1. Lidl has promised more effective action against worker exploitation

Lidl now acknowledges that abuses often occur when governments fail to protect workers and trade unions are absent or weak. The organisation has strengthened its governance process for human rights and, by upholding the Dhaka principles, tackle workers’ recruitment fees, a red flag for modern slavery. More broadly, Lidl has committed to uphold the UN’s framework for business and human rights…

2. Lidl has promised to ensure fair and equal treatment for women

Lidl has recently signed the United Nation’s Women’s Empowerment Principles. This is a first step towards ensuring gender equality for supply chain workers. This is important because the jobs women do are typically lower paid with poorer job security, and women provide far more unpaid care work. Many of us juggling work and care in the current context can appreciate how challenging this can be…

3. Lidl has promised to be more transparent

Lidl has  published the names and addresses of its direct food suppliers. The supermarkets on Oxfam’s scorecard have generally been resistant to this (with certain exceptions such as Albert Heijn, Jumbo and now Morrisons) and we welcome the fact that Lidl is showing leadership on supply chain transparency.