Kenya: Leader urges multinational tea firms to sell shares to locals to improve living standards - Business & Human Rights Resource Centre business-humanrights.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from business-humanrights.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In 2007, tea pluckers on a Unilever plantation were brutally attacked in the midst of ethnical violence triggered by a contested presidential election. As the company failed to protect them despite clear warning signs of impending violence, the victims are now taking it to court to demand reparations
Kenyan Tea Workers Demand Reparations From Unilever For Failing to Protect Them From Attacks
Tea pluckers say the brutal attacks were foreseeable but the household-goods giant failed to protect them.
Representative image. A boy standing by houses on a tea plantation near Nairob, Kenya. Photo: Bryon Lippincott/Flickr CC BY NC ND 2.0
World17/Mar/2021
At least four men armed with machetes and clubs broke into Anne Johnsonâs home. They forced her husband and 11-year-old son into the bedroom and kept Anne and her teenage daughters in a separate room. To this day, she doesnât know for certain if the men who raped her, her husband, and her daughters were her coworkers. “They spoke the local language,” Anne testified, but “they blindfolded us so we could not see who they were.”
THE STANDARD By
Kamau Muthoni |
February 2nd 2021 at 11:19:27 GMT +0300
Workers pruning tea (PHOTO: Phillip Orwa)
Thousands of tea pickers are likely to lose their jobs after the High Court cleared a tea company s move to mechanise tea picking.
Justice James Makau declared that Unilever Tea Kenya Ltd had the right to adopt new technology, affirming a Court of Appeal decision against the Kenya Plantations and Agricultural Workers Union (KPAWU). The union was seeking a ban on tea harvesting machines.
“In view of the aforesaid and as agreed by both petitioner’s and respondent’s counsel, I find as decided in the Court of Appeal decision hereinabove, the petitioner has a right to mechanise and adopt technology in its operations,” ruled Makau.