The vice-premier of the Netherlands has urged people to stop buying mushrooms from Albert Heijn, the leading Dutch supermarket, after revelations about oppression of foreign workers at local fungi farms by an investigative television show.
Lodewijk Asscher, vice-premier and minister of social affairs, called for consumers to stop buying mushrooms at Albert Heijn until the supermarket chain, owned by the Ahold retail group, agrees to use the industry’s Fair Produce certificate on its mushroom packaging.
A broadcast of the “Certificate of value” show late on Thursday showed migrant labourers forced by employers to sleep 10 to a room, and paid less than the Dutch minimum wage.
Denouncing “medieval conditions” at some mushroom farms, Mr Asscher made an unusual call for consumers to shop at rival supermarket chains C1000, COOP and Jan Linders until Albert Heijn joins them in using the Fair Produce certificate.
But Albert Heijn said Mr Asscher was misinformed, and that it buys its mushrooms only from suppliers certified by Fair Produce. The chairman of the Fair Produce organisation confirmed that in a Dutch radio interview Friday afternoon.
“We’re accompanying Mr Asscher in his efforts to diminish illegal labour in the Netherlands,” said an Albert Heijn spokesman. “We think his request to consumers to not buy mushrooms at Albert Heijn is a false statement, and we’ve asked him to at least correct that.”
Albert Heijn, which has a roughly 40 per cent market share in the Netherlands, says it believes putting the Fair Produce label on packaging would only confuse consumers as to whether its other produce is certified or not.
So far Fair Produce, established earlier this year with help from the ministry of social affairs, certifies only mushrooms, though it plans to develop certificates for other produce soon.
“The question our customers will have is, if the certificate is on the mushrooms, what’s with the cucumbers and the tomatoes?” said the Albert Heijn spokesman.
A spokesman for Mr Asscher said the vice-premier was not calling for a boycott, but needed Albert Heijn’s help in enlisting consumer pressure on the mushroom industry. The supermarket chain’s chief executive has agreed to meet with Mr Asscher over the issue next week.
The Netherlands is one of the world’s biggest agricultural exporters, with much of its produce raised in greenhouses employing migrant workers, chiefly from central and eastern Europe.
Mushroom workers are the latest group of downtrodden labourers in the consumer goods industry to step into the limelight.
Earlier this week hundreds of Indian tea plantation workers in Assam, under order to vacate their accommodation, ended a two-week stand-off by setting fire to their boss and his wife. Other attacks on tea bosses in Assam, home to half of India’s tea output, have occurred in recent years
The textile trade, too, has a long casualty list and just last month a deadly factory fire in Bangladesh killed at least 117 people at the Tazreen factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, which made clothes for Walmart, albeit without its approval.As with previous fatal accidents at factories supplying other multinationals – a fire in 2010 and a building collapse in 2005 – November’s tragedy prompted a vow from Walmart to do more on safety. Sears, whose products were also being made at the Tazreen plant, apparently without its knowledge, likewise pledged to take action.
