The Dark Brew: Starbucks Faces Landmark Lawsuit Over Alleged Slavery in Brazil
Brazilian plantation workers are suing the world’s largest coffee chain in a Washington, D.C. court, alleging forced labor and trafficking. The case could fundamentally change the coffee industry.
By Philip Bethge and—from Minas Gerais, Brazil—Gerald Traufetter
He’s never been into a Starbucks shop. The green logo? Never seen it. The name of the company? “No, I wasn’t familiar with it,” says the young Brazilian.
Visibly ill at ease, he has crossed one leg over the other and is kneading his bare foot with one hand. He begins talking hesitantly. Yes, it was in April 2024, he says, when a “gato” approached him – a cat, the term used in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais for the illegal brokers for the coffee plantations. That’s when his ordeal began.
Shortly after his 16th birthday, according to the young man’s account, he boarded a bus in his hometown and rode for 16 hours to the south, almost a thousand kilometers. Upon arrival, he says, he immediately began working at a plantation with no protective clothing for 11 to 12 hours per day beneath the blazing sun, often picking coffee on the steep slopes barefoot.
The gato, who was also the plantation’s overseer, threatened to beat him, he says. The conditions were wretched, the living quarters had no kitchen, and, out on the plantations, there were neither toilets nor clean drinking water, he says. When the coffee pickers collapsed onto their stained mattrasses in the evening, their bodies ached from hauling the heavy sacks.
“We didn’t see much of the money we were promised,” says the young man as he straightens his fraying baseball cap. He says the workers had to pay for the harvesting machines themselves, along with the fuel to run them, their own food and the bus ride to the plantation. In the end, he says, he owed the gato more than he ever earned.
Human rights experts refer to this type of forced labor as “debt bondage.” It is a term taken from the Middle Ages. But the practice, apparently, still exists.
The young man from Brazil’s coffee belt is part of a group of eight migrant laborers who are taking on an economic behemoth and suing the coffeehouse chain Starbucks. The accusation: slavery and human trafficking among the company’s suppliers.
In late April, the workers filed a civil suit against the coffee multinational at a federal court in Washington, D.C. For fear of retaliatory measures from the gatos, the names of the plaintiffs were not listed in the court documents, nor will they be used in this article. Instead, they are identified as John Doe I to John Doe VIII. DER SPIEGEL visited John Doe I, who was 16 years old when he worked at the plantation, and two other plaintiffs in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais to look into the accusations they have leveled.
