Stop sweatshops ! Why our products are different

Sweatshops are still supplying high street brands

More than a decade after sweatshop labour for top brands became a mainstream issue, the problem still seems endemic across the global clothing and footwear sector.

Indonesian labourers work at a garment factory in Jakarta. A report says that not one of the factories it surveyed in the country paid a living wage. Photograph: Mast Irham/EPA

Marks and Spencer's, Next, Ralph Lauren, DKNY, GAP, Converse, Banana Republic, Land's End, Levi's. And so the list of brands go on and on. What do they all have in common? According to a deeply depressing report (pdf) by the International Textile Garment and Leather Workers' Federation (ITGLWF), the factories in Asia contracted to make their products are still responsible for shocking working practices.

More than a decade after sweatshop labour for high street brands became a mainstream issue, and after plenty of companies have instituted monitoring of their supply chains, the problem still seems endemic right across the global clothing and footwear sector.
Many of the factories supplying the brands likely to dominate the Olympics in 2012, such as Adidas, Nike, Slazenger, Speedo and Puma, "are routinely breaking every rule in the book when it comes to labour rights", according to the ITGLWF. The list of brands ultimately sourcing from the 83 factories surveyed in the report is so comprehensive, it seems to make a mockery of the whole idea that the high street has cleaned up its act.

Factories in three countries – the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka – were surveyed, and not one of them paid a living wage to their combined 100,000-strong workforce. Many of them didn't even pay the legal minimum wage. What the report also makes clear is that this is a gender issue: 76% of the surveyed workforce are women. Globalised supply chains exploit predominantly female labour. It's an irony that probably escapes most of the women who do the bulk of high street shopping in the west. Women shopping for products made by other, underpaid, exploited, women.

What's more, things seem to be getting worse, rather than better. Employment is becoming more precarious as more workers are put on to temporary contracts, day labour, on call rather than with permanent jobs. That enables employers to dodge holiday pay, sick pay and written contracts. Employers also imposed compulsory overtime, lower wages and higher production targets on workers on these short-term contracts. [...]

M. Bunting, 28/04/2011  

guardian.co.uk  

Our company objective is to provide eco- fashion apparel and accessories, this means eco-friendly and fair products. We fight sweatshops, unfair wages, labor childs, bad labor conditions and other unfair conditions at each stage of our garment manufacturing from the farmer (fair deals) to the consumer (fair prices). Moreover to pursue this sustainable strategy and to take care not only of our neighbors, we have created a supply chain with minimal waste structure for a maximal environmental protection and we take back your used clothes for associations and recycling. And all this with an up to date, confortable and stylish design !



Why did we choose this article?

First because the article is very complete, there are hard facts and the autor that is quiete famous in her field don't hesitate to denounce the big brands that use sweatshops. She explains that because of the few mediatic scandals (Nike and others), we think all the companies became clean, but this is wrong! Working conditions in the apparel industry still very bad, even in big european capital as London there are sweatshops, and the customers must be aware about this and the brands involved.

To know more about the author : Madeleine Bunting

Founded in 1821, The Guardian is identified as centre-left liberalism. According to its editor, Alan Rusbridger it has the second largest online readership of any English-language newspaper in the world, after the New York Times. (D. Reid, T. Teixeira, 2010, "Are people ready to pay for online news?" BBC) And Madeleine Bunting is one of its notable columnists.

Madeleine Bunting was born in North Yorkshire and studied history at Corpus Christi college, Cambridge and politics at Harvard. She is now a Guardian columnist since 1989, and writes on a wide range of subjects including politics, work, Islam, science and ethics, development, women's issue and social change.

She received many awards including the Imam wa Amal Special Award in 2002 and the One World Trust award in 1999. In 2003, a Joseph Rowntree fellowship to research her book, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives (HarperCollins) which is an analysis of the British work culture. In 2006, she was awarded a fellowship on the Templeton Cambridge journalism programme.

She is also a regular contributor on radio and television and other newspapers as the Statesman. From this short biography we can conclude that she did write this article from her own point of view and using the knowledge she gains from her studies, various and serious researches and as she lives in London she was at the best place to denounce the London’s sweatshops.