Oldal 291 [291]
OCR
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-vomfairen-handel/24526252.html. + 289 +
