South African fruit pickers want share of the spoils

Recently I wrote how Tesco's £3 billion profits were in part reaped from the hard working, underpaid clothes workers in Bangladesh.

Now fruit pickers in South Africa who provide the once-grocery-now-life-consuming behemoth with produce have told The Guardian about their low pay and struggle to simply get by:

Sitting against her living room's bare brick wall, under a banner that reads "God will make a plan", Kitty De Kock breaks down in tears as she talks about her children.

"If the boss of Tesco was here, I would ask him to make things better on farms, especially for our children because they are our future," she says, head bowed as she tries to compose herself. "If things carry on this way, I don't think they have a future."

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I think Hanekom's point about "The UK supermarkets [being] under pressure from consumers. They have very high standards and that is what the consumer demands" is a telling one. Without consumers spending money in their stores, Tesco would be nothing. So let's stop perpetuating this cycle of misery and living the easy life at the misfortune of others and stop pumping money into the Tesco machine.