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" Social Protection Availability in Fair Trade: "
Binion, Sarah
Egan, Patrick
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1108866
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2468703249
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| Main Entry
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Binion, Sarah
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Egan, Patrick
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| Title & Author
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Social Protection Availability in Fair Trade:\ Binion, SarahEgan, Patrick
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| College
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Tulane University, Payson Center for International Development
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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390
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| Abstract
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Fair Trade research has produced mixed results concerning its effectiveness. Further, much of the research has focused on the farmers and producers and has neglected the poorest stakeholders in the Fair Trade supply chain, the informal rural agricultural wage laborers. An extensive study funded by the Department for International Development and undertaken by Cramer (2014) found that Fairtrade certification had no significant impact on wages for informal wageworkers in the Fairtrade-certified producer organizations examined. However, wages are only one component of a holistic view of livelihood protections in situations of vulnerable employment. The International Labour Organization has identified numerous other dimensions of what constitutes “decent work,” their initiative and agenda asserting that every job should include, among other characteristics, economic and social protections to mitigate vulnerabilities. Fairtrade certification also mandates that producers meet or exceed social protections based on the Decent Work Agenda parameters in their certification standards. Using social vulnerability and social protection data gathered from the Cramer (2014) Fair Trade Employment and Poverty Reduction (FTEPR) study, as well as qualitative data from news articles and organizational evaluations, research scholarship, and peer-reviewed articles, as well as the International Labour Organization decent work theoretical framework, this dissertation formatively and holistically analyzed social protections that exist in Fair Trade. This was accomplished by developing a social protection scale triangulated with a document analysis of qualitative data, including research articles and media documents, to compare social protections for the informal wageworkers in the Fairtrade-certified commodities of coffee, tea, and cut-flower sectors in Ethiopia and Uganda. The findings in the qualitative analysis demonstrated that social protections do occur in Fair Trade interventions, however, the quantitative social protection scale did not find any associations with Fair Trade and social protection increases, and in most cases, Fairtrade certification tended to decrease the scale. The strongest determinant of social protection was correlated with flower farm sites in Ethiopia. Ultimately, Fair Trade interventions have social protection infrastructures that likely benefit farmers who collectively organize into cooperatives and possibly workers in a formalized labor setting, but those social protections do not appear to extend to the informal agricultural wageworker.
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| Subject
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Agricultural economics
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International relations
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Labor economics
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