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THE EXPLOITATION OF LABOUR AND THE EUROPEAN VALUES
spectrum of society than sexual exploitation. Ihe purpose of the operation of
the present network is that the direct or indirect exploiters should do everything
they can to maximize a fast profit. There is nothing new about it since it coincides
with the usual activity that has characterized the spheres of economic interests
for a long time. The parties concerned who take part in it include the state and
the indirect beneficiaries of exploitation. The most important actors among the
latter are the buyers and the consumers of the products. Because of this, the
exploitation of labour can still be included in the category of normality instead
of deviance up to the present times. On the one hand, different international
and national organizations regularly condemn companies for breaking the legal
regulations that prohibit inhuman work and call for humane working conditions
as part of the normal operation of the economy. On the other hand, however, these
companies do not tend to follow norms unless they are forced to. The main reason
for that is that the moral checks and the legal values that often fail to involve
sanctions do not constitute enough balances against the extra profit oriented
economic interests.
The past few decades have been just enough — mainly through the help of NGOs
and the media supporting them — for the population of economically developed
countries to receive information about the risky conditions severely harming or
endangering human life and health among which the people who take part in
the production of cheap products work.’ For a long time, people may have had
the impression that such working conditions can prevail only in the Far East, in
Africa and South-America, that is, in places far from their living space. People
living in the “first world” may have regarded it only as sensational news that they
felt sorry about and something morally indifferent and routinely acceptable in the
“third world” when they heard about a clothes factory burning down completely,
chemical contamination victimizing huge numbers of people or other disasters.
They may have thought things like that were just something normal in those
places, something that cannot happen in their own environment and that this
kind of work culture is not characteristic of “the developed world”.
Interest in the circumstances of exploitation of labour started to grow gradually
around the turn of the millennium concerning countries of the European Union
° See, for example: Der Tagesspiegel, Ausbeutung auf Kakaofarmen. Arbeiter profitieren nicht
gleichermaßen vom fairen Handel, Der Tagesspiegel (4 July 2019), https://www.tagesspiegel.
de/wissen/ausbeutung-auf-kakaofarmen-arbeiter-profitieren-nicht-gleichermassen-vom¬
fairen-handel/24526252.html.
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