Food Work: The workers behind our food and the exploitation they face

Key messages:

Food work is the foundation of every meal we eat and central to human life, yet the people who feed us are among the most exploited workers in the world.

Food systems employ nearly 1.4 billion people – two out of every five workers – making food the largest employer and most abusive sector on the planet. Often hidden from view, food workers face low pay, wage theft, forced labour, human trafficking, discrimination, sexual violence, dangerous working conditions, and exclusion from social safety nets. From farmworkers, fishers, and slaughterhouse staff to delivery drivers, restaurant and supermarket employees, and domestic workers, labour abuse is rife throughout every link of the food chain.

Exploitation does not happen by accident: it is a structural feature of how food systems are currently organized. Unfair employment arrangements, off-the-books work, and lack of basic job security all combine to entrench worker vulnerability. Governments directly enable this abuse through legal carve-outs that explicitly exempt food and farm workers from basic protections on wages, workplace safety, and union rights. Even where protective laws exist, weak public enforcement and pervasive informal employment leave millions of workers unprotected.

Migrant workers are essential to today’s food systems, yet face some of the highest rates of workplace abuse, wage theft, forced labour, injury, and death. Government migration policies actively maintain this vulnerability. Restrictive visas, employer-controlled recruitment, insecure legal status, and weak enforcement leave millions of migrant food workers exposed to extreme abuse and stripped of basic human rights.

Compounding these structural abuses, a dangerous convergence of emerging forces is making food work increasingly hazardous and exploitative. Climate change is exposing workers to extreme heat, severe weather, toxic wildfire smoke, and growing pesticide use. Corporate concentration is driving a race to the bottom by suppressing wages, undermining collective bargaining, and shifting risks onto workers – prioritizing shareholder returns over decent work. At the cutting edge, digital technologies are creating new frontiers of exploitation: gig-based platform work, automation, algorithmic management, and workplace surveillance are isolating workers, intensifying productivity pressures, increasing injury rates, and eroding worker bargaining power.

Harms are not evenly distributed across the food workforce. Women, racialized workers, and migrants disproportionately occupy the lowest-paid, most dangerous, and least protected jobs.

While essential to food systems, women’s paid and unpaid care work – including cooking, feeding, and community care – remains routinely undervalued and undercompensated. Gender-based discrimination intersects with race, caste, class, and migration status to lock marginalized workers into the most hazardous, lowest-paid jobs – normalizing exploitation.

But just as human exploitation has been built into today’s food systems, so too can we engineer its end. Food workers have repeatedly won better pay, safer workplaces, stronger rights, and legal protections through collective organizing and policy reform. Winning rights for food workers can raise the floor for all workers.

Achieving lasting transformation depends on shifting both policy and power across five key priorities:

• Build worker power: Strengthen trade unions, expand collective bargaining to all workers, and forge broad cross-movement coalitions.
• Secure decent work: Enshrine comprehensive labour standards in law, eliminate legal carve-outs for food and farm workers, establish binding workplace safety floors, and invest in robust public labour inspection regimes.
• Guarantee equal rights for migrant workers: End policies that criminalize migrants, dismantle employer-tied visa schemes, and guarantee equal labour rights and social protections regardless of status.
• Rein in corporate power: Tackle corporate concentration, hold lead firms accountable for labour abuses throughout their supply chains, and institutionalize democratic oversight of emerging technologies.
• Value food work: Formally recognize and compensate the vital skills, lived experience, and care work essential to feeding the world.

The people who feed the world deserve safe, fairly paid, and dignified work. Food systems must never depend on low wages, hazardous conditions, or invisible labour. Achieving this requires changing who holds power, who profits, and who bears the costs.