I’ve recently been reflecting on a B Corp retreat that I attended several years ago, where I was asked to facilitate a group discussion on Ursula K LeGuin’s short story, ‘The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas’. I'll be honest that I was initially a little confused as to why we were going to have a group discussion about an obscure piece of philosophical fiction from the 1970’s at a business event, but it soon became clear.
The story describes the Festival of Summer in the utopian city state of Omelas, where music and joyous dancing fill the streets and even the horses embrace the spirit of celebration. The people of Omelas have no monarchy or slavery, no stock exchange, no advertisements, no secret police and no bombs. They also have no central heating, subway trains or washing machines, not because they are too simple, but because they are truly happy with what they have, living in joy and peace, in harmony with nature and with each other.
Omelas is a true paradise for it’s citizens, but it has a dark shadow that they all are taught during their childhood. If they are to enjoy living in such a apparently perfect society, they must accept the shadow. It is a non-negotiable deal and if the shadow were to be removed by do-gooding citizens, all of the goodness and grace of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.
For most of it’s people, this uncomfortable truth is a price that they are prepared to pay, but not everyone is able to square it with their conscience. Sometimes, a man or a woman falls silent for a day or two, then leaves home. These people go out into the street alone and keep walking, straight out of the beautiful city gates. They leave Omelas, walking into the darkness, and they do not come back.
No matter how good life might seem, some people would rather give it all up than be complicit in an abominable injustice. They are prepared to go into the discomfort of the unknown in search of a world that truly aligns with their values.
The B Corp retreat where we studied this story was itself a kind of temporary utopia, set in the landscaped grounds of an aristocratic country estate in the green rolling hills of Sussex. As a group, we contemplated how the story related to our own businesses, and what shadows we might be ignoring in the pursuit of our own utopia’s.
It was fascinating to see how this exercise challenged us all to delve into areas that we would not normally look. Perhaps the most challenging question that arose was, “How many of our businesses have a dependency on their being poverty in the world?”
Or put another way, “How many of our businesses could survive without access to cheap labour and resources?”
This group I facilitated found this question deeply uncomfortable. The initial knee jerk reaction was to reject it out of hand, but when we opened Pandora’s box, we found that all of our businesses benefitted from (and were likely dependent on) cheap labour and resources from poor communities in some way, whether that be farmers in Africa, textile workers in India, the people mining minerals for our electronic equipment or even low income workers here in the UK.
Despite some of the companies involved even being Fairtrade certified, it became clear that all were receiving a hidden subsidy from the fact that much of the world has lower wages and working conditions than the UK. Perhaps more worryingly, it highlighted our unconscious bias that we believe this is acceptable.
I’ve long been a big believer in the fair trade movement, having been inspired by the possibility of more ethical business models by pioneering brands such as Cafedirect and Divine Chocolate. I still believe strongly in the principle of fair trade, but this exercise at the B Corp retreat made me realise that we need to think more deeply about what we mean by fair.
This is not to challenge the benefit of existing approaches like fair trade schemes, but to expand our thinking to examine what type of fairness we are truly aiming for. Just a few definitions of fairness that I came across include:
making judgments that are free from discrimination
impartial and honest business dealings that are free from self-interest, prejudice, or favouritism
circumstances providing an equal chance of success to all
These are pretty easy to get on board with conceptually, but surprisingly hard to actually pin down. What does it mean to provide an equal chance of success? Can any business dealing ever truly be free of self-interest? And what exactly do we mean by discrimination when trading in a globalised economy? Furthermore, who should get to decide when something is and isn’t fair?
If there is one thing that I have learned in life and business so far, it’s that fairness is highly subjective.
Fancy a cup of tea?
To help us explore the idea of fairness in trade, let’s use the example of Britain’s favourite pastime - drinking tea.
Many years ago, I attended a Green Party meeting in Leamington Spa at the home of a lovely old lady called Janet. I remember the meeting well because I'd eaten roasted onions for lunch and the meeting was constantly interrupted by what sounded like a tiny little tiger roaring inside my stomach, much to my embarrassment and the amusement of others.
Janet served us with a bowl full of Goji berries and a pot of loose leaf tea. She told us that she only uses loose leaf tea because tea bags don't allow the tea to properly infuse, therefore wasting the tea leaves. Janet wasn’t saying this as a tea snob, but because she believed that it was an insult to the women in India who worked so hard to pick every individual leaf for us. To mindlessly throw away their hard work by using tea bags would be disrespectful and unfair.
20 years later, on my recent trip to India, I was lucky enough to visit the tea plantations of Munnar in Kerala. As soon as I set eye on the tea plantations, I remembered Janet’s words. The paths of the tea gardens are unimaginably steep, narrow and rough, with the tea pickers tirelessly carrying their heavy baskets on their backs as they diligently work in the south Indian sun for subsidence wages. I suddenly understood why Janet treated every tea leaf as precious, and why she had so much respect and gratitude for those who worked so hard to provide it.
An average tea picker in India earns about £2.20 a day for their physically gruelling labour, with the poorest getting as little as £1.60 and the best paid, those in Kerala, getting around £4 per day. Would those of us sipping our tea in the UK be prepared to do the same work for so little money? And to what extent is our brew being subsidised by the poverty of Indian tea workers?
Well, let’s work it out.
Although most of the world’s tea is grown in Asia, there is actually a sole tea plantation here in the UK at Tregothnan in Cornwall. I assume that all workers at Tregothnan are paid at least the UK minimum wage and benefit from the UK’s tighter employment regulations.
So how does the cost compare to Indian tea?
A pack of Tregothnan’s ‘Great British Tea’ costs 40p per tea bag, compared to 4p for a bag of PG Tips, the best selling brand of tea in the UK.
PG Tips isn’t Fairtrade certified so I looked for Fairtrade certified tea bags and found them in my local Coop store at, um, 1.7p per tea bag. That’s less than half the price of PG Tips!
This seemed like a strange anomaly and I can only assume that this is a loss leader for the Coop and doesn’t reflect the actual cost of the tea. As an alternative comparison, I then found Clipper organic and fair trade tea at 5p per bag, which sounds more realistic. Using this comparison, it looks like organic, fairtrade tea is roughly 25% more expensive than regular tea.
So the British grown tea costs ten times more than regular tea and eight times more than organic, fairtrade tea. Or put another way, a typical tea bag comes with a 90% discount as a result of it being produced in India where workers are significantly poorer than here in the UK.
Tea from Tregothnan might seem expensive to most people, but viewed the other way, tea from India seems unnaturally cheap. We sit in our armchairs here in the UK, gulping down this exotic infusion thanks to the hard work of poor communities in asia. Even if it is Fairtrade certified, I can’t help but feel that this doesn’t really seem fair.
But as I said, fairness is subjective.
During our visit to the tea plantations in Munnar, we spent two days with a young taxi driver called Lenin, who as his name suggests is born to parents who support the Communist Party of Kerala. Both his mother and father are tea pickers for Tata, the Indian industrial conglomerate that owns almost every tea plantation in the region.
You might imagine that Lenin and his family would see Tata as an exploitative capitalist organisation taking advantage of their community, but the truth was more nuanced. He laughed about the apparent monopoly that Tata has over the local tea plantations but he didn’t seem to have any resentment. He was proud of being a taxi driver and being able to live his parents dreams of a better life, in part thanks to the opportunities and support provided by Tata to his family. His parents might be incredibly poor, but Tata had provided them with much needed secure employment, shared housing, and free primary education for their children including Lenin. In the context of the society they were born into, they felt they were treated fairly and were grateful for it.
In other words, they felt that the society they lived in was unfair, but the deal they had with their employer was fair when considering that context. This is the paradox of fairness, in that something can be simultaneously fair and unfair at the same time depending on where we stand.
The slippery slope
We must grapple with this paradox of fairness as we attempt to create a more fair economy and develop models of fairer trade.
To me, the foundation is to attempt to ensure that all business dealings, whether with an employee here in the UK or with a supplier in a developing country, are seen as a win-win by both parties. If both sides are happy with the deal, then it can be deemed a good deal. From there, those of us lucky enough to be the more privileged party in the deal might go above and beyond, offering the other party more than they expect while still achieving a win-win. These small gestures of generosity go counter to the prevailing business culture of win-lose negotiating, but they serve everybody better in the long run and help lift others up.
At the same time, these small acts of generosity and incremental improvement might never deliver true fairness in the context of the bigger system. When talking about fair trade, we need be careful that we don’t imply that just because the deal was fair, that the system itself is fair. Lenin’s family might feel that they have a fair deal from Tata, but that doesn’t make the tea industry or the global economy fair.
I've always wondered why we take it for granted that labour in many other countries is cheaper than here in the UK. It seems to be culturally ingrained in us that our time and resources are somehow worth more than most other people’s. Likewise there seems to be a cultural acceptance in many poorer countries that their time is worth less than ours. In some ways this is a hangover of colonialism, but really it’s part of a bigger dynamic of power imbalances that goes back to the earliest days of recorded history. So long as there were rich and poor, the playing field was on a slippery slope in favour of the rich.
There’s no easy solution to this because our global economy is inherently built upon these inequalities. We can’t keep the same system and also level the playing field, because just like the classic Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling Competition, the game we are playing is designed to be played on a slope. Sure, we can make the economic slope a bit less steep and we should endeavour to do so, but in this system it will always be a slope.
If we truly want to level the playing field, we have to be prepared to walk away from Omelas, into the murky lands of the unknown to create a different game, a different economy and a different society.
For most of us, including me, that’s a hard possibility to even comprehend, but sometimes we have to call our own bluff. Either we accept the shadows of our current system, or we start to face up to the fact that we might need to do more than tweak around the edges.
Just like that B Corp retreat did, we need to get comfortable putting uncomfortable conversations like this on the table so that we can honestly examine what type of future we are trying to create.
So on that note, leave a comment or share your thoughts on LinkedIn to let me know - What would truly fair trade look like to you? Would you walk away from Omelas to create a fairer economy? And if so, where might you head?
P.S. I’ll be offline a lot over the next couple of weeks so I might be slowing in replying to messages, but I promise I will so please do share, and accept my apologies in advance for any slow replies.
Wonderful article, thank you for sharing! My friend has an article that discusses the gift economy, and I think this idea approaches real fair trade: https://weallcanchange.substack.com/p/love-manifesto