Discounter

For many years, food discounters lure customers into their shops by sensationally cheap promotional goods. In some sectors, such as trade with personal computers, household goods and textiles, discounters such as Aldi, Lidl or KiK were successful in gaining significant market shares and displacing competitors. However SÜDWIND proved in several research projects that employees of the branches and suppliers of discounters, in the great majority women, paid a high price for this. More

Informal Work

Almost two-thirds of the world’s working population are employed in the informal economy, where socially unprotected labour and poverty are widespread. More than half of informal workers are women. In recent decades, an important lever for lowering labour and social standards was the expansion of “free export zones”. 66 million people, most of them women, are employed in these tax- and customs enclaves of 130 developing and emerging countries. SÜDWIND and partners have demonstrated time and again that labour rights in free export zones are largely suspended. More