The fair trade label found on products in many supermarkets is enough to reassure most consumers that the goods they are buying have been manufactured and produced to ethical guidelines.

Now, however, a recent investigation has posed the inevitable question – when is Fairtrade, not Fairtrade? A study by the BBC focused on working conditions at Pratts Bananas in Luton , a ‘Fairtrade’ company that supplies Britain ’s biggest-selling fruit to a number of the country’s leading supermarkets, including Waitrose and Tesco.

Under Fairtrade, each banana is quality-tested at least twice, once at the farm and once at the ripening depot. Every supplier also signs an agreement to pay fair prices to growers in the third world. So far, so good.

But thanks to covert recordings and on-the-record interviews with staff, this Fairtrade agreement does not appear to stretch to the 300-or-so employees who spend up to 15 hours a day for six, sometimes seven days a week, carrying 20 kilo boxes of bananas over several dozen times during the course of a shift.

One women, a Polish worker who is currently taking the company to an employment tribunal, said she believed that the workers in the factory were treated like animals, at times being forced to wait up to ten hours for a break – the current European Working Time Directive states that each employee is entitled to a 20 minute break if they are working over six hours a day.

So where does Fairtrade end? The moment the suppliers receive a fair sum for their crop and the shipment arrives? Or when the product finally finds its way into your shopping trolley?

The current case appears to be an isolated one, but the question is still valid.