As of January 2019, TFT has become Earthworm Foundation.

TFT’s Respect programme aims to ensure every worker in the supply chains we work in benefits from our drive for transformation. We have been tackling social issues for nearly as long as we’ve been protecting forests, having started by looking at worker issues in forests in 1999, we moved on to work on worker welfare in the stone industry in the mid 2000s.

First, we need to make sure workers are safe. Blasting takes place in quarries, with workers sticking dynamite in the rocks and running away, hoping nobody gets hurt from the explosion. Quite often people do get hurt. People get killed too.

Respect Programme Leader Hilary Thompson once asked a quarry manager whether they had any fatalities in their day to day operations. He said they had about one a week. Dead workers don’t collect wages, disabled workers lose their jobs and so our first priority is to protect workers by improving health and safety on sites.

Listen to Hilary talk about Respect in this podcast with TFT Founder Scott Poynton.