Sweatshops

Bangladesh unrest grows as death toll rises

The death toll from the Rana Plaza factory collapse has now passed 700. It is one of the worst industrial disasters in recent history, and the worst ever in Bangladesh. A government building inspector has confirmed that the building, which housed five factories, was built with inadequate, weak materials that could not withstand vibrations caused by electricity generators on the top floor. The building’s architect has said it was intended to house residential or light commercial properties rather than heavy industry. Primark, one of the western suppliers which sourced textiles from the factory...

Dhaka factory tragedy: capitalism is guilty

On the afternoon of 24 April, Rana Plaza, an eight-storey building housing textile factories in Savar, a suburb of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, collapsed. When rescuers gave up searching for survivors on 29 April, the official death toll was 380. Local police ordered an evacuation of the building on Tuesday 23 April after workers reported cracks in the building’s structure. The factory owners ignored these concerns and forced more than 2,000 workers to remain in the building. Workers reported the use of intimidation tactics, including threats of docking pay, to silence those who spoke out...

Call centre exploits prison labour for £3 a day

Becoming Green, a company which markets environmentally-sustainable energy to homeowners, has been exposed using prison labour on slave wages in its Cardiff call centre. Almost 20% of the call centre’s staff in July and August were inmates from Prescoed prison in Monmouthshire, around 21 miles away from the centre. The prison workers were paid just £3 per day for their work. Becoming Green had been employing the prisoners for 40-day periods, but as there is no centralised regulation on how long external employers can employ prison labour on “training contracts”, Becoming Green could keep...

Making High Street clothes at 14p an hour

Between 3 and 11 December the anti-sweatshop campaign, No Sweat, will be touring with members of the National Garment Workers Federation of Bangladesh. This grassroots union federation has been at the frontline of a recent wave of strikes and riots. Like the shopworkers in this country, the garment workers of Bangladesh have never felt any benefit from the bumper profits made by the high-street giants. From garment workers being paid 14p an hour through to checkout staff in London on £6 an hour, surplus value is extracted at every opportunity, with each hour of sweated labour contributing to...

Why we picket Tesco

Since October last year, London No Sweat, has been holding regular pickets of Tesco stores in the East End, exposing the exploitation that lies at the root of Tesco’s bumper profits and focussing particularly on workers’ struggles in Bangladesh. At our meeting in March Sam Maher updated us on the situation in Bangladesh. The garment industry is key to the Bangladeshi economy and to the global trade in textiles. Employing 2.2 million workers (90% of whom are women), the Bangladeshi textiles industry is enormous, compromising 75% of the country’s exports. Bangladesh’s outputs are one fifth of...

The Beijing Olympics and class struggle

The Olympic spectacular in August this year is likely to be another step on China’s march towards great power status. For sure the media will marvel at the incredible stadia, the clean streets of the capital and the immensity of the country. So spare a thought for the workers on Beijing’s Olympic construction sites, working for about US$5 a day, often not getting paid until the end of the year and sometimes not at all. To bring the sporting showpiece to the world, workers are toiling at least ten hours a day. They don’t get weekends off, nor any paid holiday, and most have no contract or...

Organising young workers: it can be done!

New Zealand union organiser Mike Treen and French union activist Axel Persson spoke on organising, unionising and fighting for the rights of — mostly young — workers in the fast food industry. They were speaking at a No Sweat meeting in the University of London Union on Saturday 16 February. Axel Persson Union activism in the fast food industry first started up after a 2002 strike in McDonalds that lasted for over a year. About a year ago a few of us in the CGT union decided to do some serious union work in the industry. We decided that we needed at least one person in each restaurant if we...

Temporary and agency workers fight

Last week a group of cleaners at Stansted airport were told not to come to work the next day as they were no longer required. Most are from Eastern Europe and Africa. All are agency workers. Temporary and agency workers are in a particularly precarious position. They can be hired and fired almost at will. They have no guaranteed hours or permanent contract of employment. They often work for lower wages and receive less favourable sick pay and other ‘perks’ than the directly-employed colleagues they work alongside. Added to this, scams and abuse such as categorising these workers as “self...

Assessing anti-sweatshop campaigns

Today’s globalised clothing industry involves transnational networks of production and sales in which manufacturing is subcontracted to producers, usually in developing countries. To respond to the often horrific sweatshop conditions that result requires organising across national frontiers with multiple targets — the brands under which the clothes are sold and the subcontractors who supply them. In a new book about garment workers * Ethel Brooks provides a critique of certain forms of “transnational labor organising” by looking at both ends of the chain, which she divides into the global...

Would you like a certificate with that?

You’ve tasted the Big Mac, you’ve probably had some McNuggets in your time but how about getting your chops round a McA-Level? Sceptical? Me too. David Fairhurst, senior vice-president and chief people officer of McDonalds, is hailing his company’s decision to award work-based qualifications as “an important and exciting step” for the company. The qualifications, by combining marketing, HR and customer service skills to the equivalent of A Level, will offer employees the all-important opportunity for “social mobility”, roughly translated as “getting working class kids to stomp on other working...

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