OLGA WORKED in a Colombian greenhouse for years, picking 350 roses a day. Her muscles and bones ached. She felt persistently dizzy and nauseous. Her supervisors sent her back onto the greenhouse floor ten or fifteen minutes after pesticide fumigation — not long enough for the chemicals to disperse, but long enough to maintain the quota. Eventually she grew too sick to work. She does not know whether she will recover. When a researcher asked her about protective equipment, she said there was very little. When they asked whether she had considered complaining, she said she needed the job.
That formulation — “I need the job” — is, inadvertently, the most honest slogan the global cut-flower industry has ever produced. It captures, with economy and precision, the power relationship that governs the working lives of hundreds of thousands of people in Colombia, Ecuador, Kenya, Ethiopia, and elsewhere: the absence of alternatives, the presence of need, and the leverage that combination places in the hands of those who do the hiring. The industry is, in many producing regions, among the largest formal employers available to rural women. That fact matters enormously. It is also entirely insufficient to end the conversation.
The Architecture of the Workforce
The cut-flower industry’s labour force is shaped by one structural fact above all others: it is overwhelmingly female. In Ethiopia, an estimated 85% of the flower workforce is women. In Colombia, roughly 60% of the nearly 100,000 flower workers are women, many of them single mothers. In Kenya and Ecuador, women similarly dominate the greenhouse floor. The industry did not arrive at this composition by accident.
Women in the producing countries represent the labour pool most available to low-wage agricultural employment — because of limited alternatives, because of family structures that constrain geographic mobility, because employers in industries dependent on manual dexterity and sustained attention to detail have found that female workers perform these tasks reliably and at lower cost than male counterparts. This is not a subtle dynamic. It is documented, understood by all parties to the employment relationship, and built into the wage structures that prevail across the industry.
The result is an employment model that extracts significant value from a structurally disadvantaged workforce. Flower farms in developing countries typically pay above the agricultural minimum wage in their respective countries — and the industry frequently cites this fact as evidence of its developmental contribution. What this comparison obscures is that agricultural minimum wages in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Ecuador are set at levels that bear no relationship to what a family actually needs to live on. In Kenya and Ethiopia, flower farm workers are paid between 50 and 65% of the living wage as calculated by the Anker Methodology, the most credible international standard for assessing whether wages meet basic needs. In Ecuador, the law provides for higher wages, but even these are typically insufficient to cover basic necessities. In Ethiopia, there is no legal minimum wage at all.
Wages: The Race to the Bottom
The global flower trade has a structural tendency to drive wages down. Production migrated from the Netherlands to Colombia in the 1970s, in part because Colombian labour was cheaper. When Colombian wages began to rise, production expanded to Ecuador and Kenya, where wages were lower still. When Kenyan and Ethiopian wages became the subject of international NGO attention and certification-scheme requirements, newer entrants to the market — Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zimbabwe — competed partly on the basis of lower labour costs. The US Congress’s Andean Trade Preference Act, passed in 1991 ostensibly to reduce coca cultivation, created the tariff conditions that made Colombian and Ecuadorian flowers cost-competitive in American markets: a policy instrument designed to fight the drug trade that functioned, in practice, as a subsidy for cheap flower labour.
In Kenya, the average monthly wage for a flower worker brings in less than €100, while the industry itself generates close to €900m in annual export revenue. The ratio is not accidental. It reflects the structure of a global supply chain in which value accumulates at the top — at the Dutch auction houses, the supermarket buyers, the retailers — and cost accumulates at the bottom, among the workers who do the cutting. When a buyer at a supermarket chain in Germany demands that its rose supplier reduce its farm-gate price by 3%, the farm does not absorb that cost in its profit margin. It absorbs it in its wage bill.
Production quotas make this calculation visible in the most direct possible way. In Ecuador and Colombia, workers in classification and packing are expected to process between 1,250 and 1,500 stems per hour. Harvesters are expected to cut 250 to 350 stems per hour. These quotas are set not on the basis of what a human body can comfortably sustain, but on the basis of what a human body can be made to do under the pressure of needing the job. Working days of up to 20 hours have been documented during peak seasons — the weeks before Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas — when the flower calendar demands a surge of production that the permanent workforce cannot supply alone.
Overtime: The Invisible Tax
The overtime that defines peak season in the flower industry is, in many cases, neither voluntary nor compensated. In Ethiopia and Ecuador, research has found that overtime is often compulsory and either unpaid or paid at standard rather than premium rates. A working day at a Kenyan flower farm is officially eight hours. Workers report routinely feeling obliged to work an extra three hours, for which they do not receive overtime pay. The calculation is simple: complain and lose the job, or stay silent and lose the time.
For women workers — the majority of the workforce — unpaid overtime creates a particular burden. Flower farms are not, in general, distinguished by the quality of their childcare provision. The combination of long working days and inadequate childcare facilities falls almost entirely on mothers of young children, who must either make private arrangements at significant cost or bring their children to work with them. In Ecuador, the International Labour Organisation has estimated that 48,000 children work in flower farms in just two provinces, a figure that reflects not a culture of indifference to child welfare, but a rational response to an economic system that offers no alternative. Children as young as nine have been documented working alongside their mothers in Colombian greenhouses, helping meet the quotas that determine whether the family can meet its basic needs.
The Chemical Greenhouse
Of all the documented harms affecting flower workers, the most physically consequential is chemical exposure. The cut-flower industry is one of the most pesticide-intensive forms of agriculture on earth, and most of those pesticides are applied by hand, in enclosed spaces, by workers with inadequate or no protective equipment.
In Colombia, a survey of 8,000 flower workers found that individuals had been exposed to as many as 127 different pesticides. Of those, 20% were found to be banned or unregistered in the United States because of their known toxicity or carcinogenic properties. Two-thirds of Colombian floriculture workers suffer from pesticide-related health problems, including impaired vision, stillbirths, congenital malformations, and respiratory and neurological disorders. The Colombian flower industry applies 200 kilograms of pesticides per hectare annually. These are not abstract statistics. They are the clinical record of a workforce that has been systematically denied the protection that regulations in the countries consuming these flowers would never permit for their own workers.
Ecuador’s record is no better. A 2024 study of Ecuadorian floriculture workers found that 61% showed symptoms consistent with pneumonitis, attributed to pesticide exposure. Some studies report pesticide poisoning rates of up to 60% among flower workers. Workers receive an average monthly pay of approximately $482 — Ecuador’s minimum wage — while often working unpaid overtime under pressure to maintain productivity. Several workers reported being fined if they miss a shift. A World Resources Institute study found that 40% of Ecuadorian workers had no protective equipment at all when pesticides were sprayed in their vicinity. A Harvard School of Public Health study examined children of women exposed to pesticides during pregnancy in Ecuador’s flower-growing region and found developmental delays of up to four years on aptitude tests. The pesticides, in other words, do not limit their effects to the adults who handle them directly.
Workers throughout the greenhouse production process — spraying, cutting, sorting, packing — are exposed to chemicals that, in enclosed and poorly ventilated spaces, accumulate to concentrations that would trigger enforcement action if they occurred in a workplace in the UK, Germany, or the United States. South American roses are frequently sprayed heavily just hours before cutting; residues linger. The inspectors who check imported flowers at US customs wear protective equipment. The people who grew those flowers did not.
Sexual Harassment: The Undisclosed Standard
The concentration of women in low-status roles within a hierarchically male-managed industry produces conditions for sexual harassment and abuse that are extensively documented across the producing countries. In Ecuador, a study by the International Labor Rights Forum found that 55% of flower workers had experienced sexual harassment, 25% had been forced to have sex with a coworker or superior, and 10% had been sexually assaulted. Many women reported being offered improvements in their working conditions in exchange for sexual favours by supervisors who controlled shift allocation, bonus pay, and contract renewal. They were not in a position to refuse without consequence.
In Colombia and Kenya, human rights organisations have collected complaints of sexual harassment by male supervisors alongside the more quantifiable violations of labour law. In Kenya, the Human Rights Commission’s 2012 report — titled, with pointed irony, “Wilting in Bloom: The Irony of Women’s Labour Rights in the Cut-Flower Sector” — documented the systematic failure of flower farms to implement legal protections that nominally existed, including protection from harassment and discrimination based on pregnancy. Kenyan women working in flower farms who become pregnant face an industry that has consistently failed to follow what is stipulated in law under the Constitution of Kenya and the Employment Act 2007. Workers on casual contracts — a category that expanded as the industry sought to avoid the costs of permanent employment — are particularly exposed, because they have no job security from which to resist.
The pattern is structural, not incidental. Industries that concentrate vulnerable workers in low-status roles, managed by supervisors whose authority is unchecked by functioning union representation or effective external monitoring, reliably produce high rates of harassment. The flower industry has constructed precisely those conditions, in multiple countries, over several decades.
Unions: The Absent Counterweight
The most reliable mechanism for improving labour conditions in any industry is collective bargaining. Organised workers can negotiate wages, safety standards, overtime rules, and protection from dismissal that no certification scheme or voluntary corporate code of conduct can replicate. The flower industry, across its producing countries, has demonstrated a consistent and determined resistance to that mechanism.
In Ecuador, of the hundreds of flower companies in operation, only three are unionised. Ecuador has a documented history of union busting; in Colombia, trade unionists have been subjected not merely to dismissal but to harassment and assassination. In Ethiopia, discrimination against unionised workers has been documented; the country’s only trade union federation representing farm workers, the NFFPFATU, is not industry-specific and has no collective bargaining agreement for the floriculture sector. Ethiopia has no legal requirement to accommodate employees, and the enforcement infrastructure that would give legal protections practical effect does not exist.
Kenya is the outlier. It has two industry-specific labour organisations — the Kenya Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union and the Agricultural Employers Association — with a functioning collective bargaining framework. This institutional difference is reflected in outcomes: Kenyan flower farm wages are higher than Ethiopian wages for comparable roles. Safety standards on certified Kenyan farms are generally better than on equivalent operations in Ethiopia or Ecuador. This is not because Kenyan employers are more virtuous, but because Kenyan workers have organisational leverage that Ethiopian and Ecuadorian workers do not. As of 2023, the average monthly wage on Kenyan flower farms had risen by nearly 30% over the previous five years, driven in part by rising union activity and labour disputes — a development that the industry describes as a cost pressure, but which is more accurately described as democracy functioning as intended.
The broader lesson is clear: the strongest predictor of decent labour conditions in floriculture is not the presence of international certification, consumer pressure, or corporate social responsibility commitments. It is whether workers can organise without being fired for doing so.
Certification: Promise and Reality
The proliferation of certification schemes across the flower industry — Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, MPS, GlobalG.A.P., and various national equivalents — represents a genuine response to documented labour abuses, and the schemes have produced genuine improvements on the farms that participate in them. Workers on Fairtrade-certified flower plantations have formal labour contracts as a norm, which remains a rarity on non-certified estates. The Fairtrade Premium, one of the highest of any Fairtrade product category, has funded education, community infrastructure, and workers’ rights training. More than 11,000 women flower workers in Ethiopia have benefitted from Fairtrade’s Dignity For All programme. These are not trivial achievements.
The limitations are equally real. Certification schemes cover a minority of the industry’s output. Their auditing mechanisms are imperfect — auditors visit farms on schedules that allow management to prepare, and workers who raise concerns during audits can face retaliation that the audit process is not designed to detect or prevent. Some schemes, including Colombia’s own Florverde label, have been criticised for operating as industry self-certification with limited enforcement weight. The scheme certifies flowers even where fundamental labour rights are inadequately protected, and has historically given insufficient weight to wages and freedom of association.
The underlying structural problem is that certification schemes are demand-side interventions in a supply-side problem. They work by giving consumers in wealthy countries a mechanism to express a preference for better-produced flowers, which creates price incentives for some farms to improve their practices. This mechanism works partially and unevenly. It does not address the workers on uncertified farms, who are the majority. It does not change the auction-house pricing dynamics that squeeze farm margins. It does not give workers the one thing that would most reliably improve their conditions: the ability to organise without fear of dismissal.
The Supply Chain’s Hidden Architecture
One reason the labour abuses in the flower industry have proved so durable is the architecture of the supply chain that connects a Kenyan rose to a Dutch auction and then to a supermarket shelf in Manchester. It is a chain of deliberate opacity.
Some Kenyan flower farms sell their export revenue to sister companies in Dubai at artificially low prices, which means that profits are not realised at the Kenyan farm — where they would be subject to Kenyan corporate tax and potentially subject to labour cost pressures — but at a foreign entity where tax rates are lower and worker representation does not exist. The practice is a variant of transfer pricing familiar from the broader literature on multinational tax avoidance, and it has a specific labour consequence: it makes it harder to establish what the farms’ true profitability is, and therefore harder to argue that wages could be higher without destroying the business.
The multi-tiered supply chain also makes it structurally difficult for consumer pressure to reach the right place. A British supermarket buyer committed to ethical sourcing faces a chain that runs through an importer, a Dutch auction house, a Colombian exporter, and a sub-contracted farm, at each link of which the original commitment is diluted, translated into a price requirement, and passed on. The farm at the end of that chain does not experience consumer demand for fair wages. It experiences a price per stem. The labour conditions that produce that stem are, from the supply chain’s perspective, internal to the farm — not its problem.
The Developmental Promise and Its Reckoning
The industry’s defenders, when pressed on labour conditions, return consistently to the employment argument: that flower farms provide formal jobs to women who would otherwise have no formal employment, in countries where no alternative industry of comparable scale exists. This argument deserves to be taken seriously. It is true that in Ethiopia, an estimated 180,000 workers — 85% of them women — have been brought into the formal wage economy by floriculture. It is true that in Colombia and Ecuador, the industry employs single mothers and women from rural communities in work that, however inadequately compensated, provides cash income and some degree of economic independence that would otherwise be unavailable.
What is also true is that the conditions under which this employment is provided are not an unfortunate by-product of the industry’s otherwise sound economics. They are its business model. The flower industry in developing countries is cost-competitive with Dutch production because labour is cheap, because chemical regulations are weak, because unions are suppressed or absent, and because workers have no alternative but to accept the terms on offer. Remove those conditions and the industry’s comparative advantage largely disappears. This is why the industry has not, on its own initiative, moved to implement living wages, to guarantee voluntary overtime, to provide adequate protective equipment, or to permit free union organisation across its operations. Not because these improvements are prohibitively expensive — the cost of paying a living wage across the entire Kenyan flower workforce, for instance, would add a few cents to the price of a bunch of roses — but because the business model depends on not paying them.
The US imported $2 billion worth of cut flowers in 2023. The global cut-flower market is valued at approximately $37 billion. The workers who grow those flowers earn wages that leave them below the living-wage threshold in virtually every producing country. The arithmetic of that relationship does not resolve itself through consumer awareness campaigns or voluntary certification. It resolves itself when workers have the power to bargain, and when the governments that authorise flower-farm operations decide that a development model built on suppressed wages and chemical exposure is not, in fact, development.
A Path Forward
The history of labour conditions in export agriculture suggests that meaningful improvement follows a consistent pattern: worker organisation, enabling legislation, and enforcement — in that order. Certification schemes and consumer pressure accelerate change at the margins; they do not substitute for the central mechanism.
In Kenya, the combination of industry-specific unions, collective bargaining infrastructure, and a reasonably functional labour law framework has produced better outcomes than its neighbours. That model, imperfect as it is, points toward what is needed elsewhere. Ethiopia requires a minimum wage; the absence of one is not a structural inevitability but a policy choice. Ecuador requires union protection laws with genuine enforcement; the history of union busting on flower farms is a function of weak state capacity and political will, not of immutable economic conditions.
For European and American consumers, the most direct lever available remains certification — choosing Fairtrade or genuinely audited equivalents — combined with political pressure on supermarket buyers to publish supply chain information and set binding wage floors rather than voluntary commitments. These are limited instruments. They are not nothing.
For the workers themselves, the lever is organisation — slow, risky, and frequently punished. The flower worker who stands with a union placard in Cayambe or Naivasha knows exactly what she is doing, and exactly what it costs. She is making the same calculation she makes every day, just in the opposite direction: weighing what she has against what she needs, and deciding, this time, that the need is large enough to bear the risk. The industry she is confronting has benefited for decades from workers who made the other calculation. The question is how much longer it can count on them to keep doing so.
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