Thursday, June 27, 2013

Women of note




When you've been a woman for as long as I have - almost as long as the Queen's been the Queen - you get used to the way that sexism pervades our society.

It ranges from builders' wolf whistles to rape; from ironic references to cushions and hoovering to violence of the tongue as devastating as a blow to the stomach. And for all the equality laws of the past four decades, women are still lower paid and still find it harder to get full-time jobs.

There are the ignorant - people who lump women together with the disabled, homosexuals, immigrants and 'other minorities', forgetting that women are the majority - and the unthinking. Female votes put the brake on 80mph shouted the Times splash headline on Saturday, almost inviting every bloke who picked up the paper to blame the missus for spoiling the fun.

In fact most drivers, both male and female, were in favour of the higher limit. But Downing Street was apparently afraid of losing the votes of  women who were against the change and so abandoned the plan.

The logic of this escapes me, so I'll run through that again: 53% of women were in favour of an 80mph limit, 41% were not - so rather than upset the 41%, the plan was dropped. Sounds like nonsense, and of course it is. But it's so much easier to put the focus on unidentifiable 'females' than on the safety campaigners and vested interests that lobbied against the change.

When it comes to equality, certain sectors of society are locked in the first half of the last century,  most particularly business and finance, politics, the police and the media. They beat their chests and wring their hands saying 'We'd love more women to come forward/move up'. But they don't mean a word of it. They talk about ratios and quotas and positive discrimination.

Women don't need these things; the need is for there to be a will to treat everyone equally - for without that will, no artificial devices can correct the imbalance.

More women than men are qualifying as doctors, vets,  lawyers and dentists - the most competitive fields of study - and there are far more female undergraduates across our universities than there are male. So there is no doubt the talent is there, it just all goes pear-shaped in the workplace.

There are only three women at the helm of FTSE 100 companies because businesses and boardrooms are stuffed with stuffed shirts in black suits who think that a woman's role is the packed lunch in their briefcases. Tory deadwoodsmen in the shires are the same, picking wideboys over intelligent women as their parliamentary candidates. We had a woman prime minister once, didn't we? What more do we want? (The irony of that is that these diehards would have shaken the ladder as she climbed the first few rungs, and then ended up adoring her.)

But they've always been like that. They just need educating - though preferably not by the Australian political classes.

More worrying are the police and the media, who seem to be regressing towards the 19th century.

No matter how often codes of conduct are revised, no matter how many public inquiries condemn police practices, nothing seems to shift the mindset that only white men are worthy of respect - whether inside or outside of the force.

Meanwhile television networks that regard grey hair in male presenters as a sign of gravitas continue to push women off camera the moment the first wrinkle appears. Within the Press, middle-aged white men are again dominant in setting the news agendas while women, with few exceptions, are once more consigned to features or subordinate roles. This is especially galling after the great strides of the 80s and 90s.


Given all this, it's hardly surprising that there has been an upsurge in interest in the feminist movement - and the centenary this month of Emily Davison's Derby death has been a convenient peg for a new call to action.

Lest there is any doubt that action is required, take a look at the Everyday Sexism Project,   an alarming catalogue of evidence of the contempt in which women are held, especially by young men who should have been taught better by baby-boomer parents. Fresh examples appear on the site and on Twitter every minute (no exaggeration), here is a random selection:








So how are we women countering the louts and the dinosaurs?

By demanding an end to page 3 girls and a petition to have a woman's picture on a banknote.

I'm treading on dangerous ground here, but these don't seem to me to be the vital issues of the day. Pretty young girls are queueing up to feature on page 3 and if they want to take off their bras and pose for photographs in the hope of advancing themselves, why stop them?  The budding lawyers, doctors, vets and dentists have their opportunities, is it right to deny those with a little less up top (but a bit more further down) their chance of a richer life?

Is it exploitative? Is it demeaning? Is it offensive? Perhaps, but I find I object more to the nudge, nudge, wink, wink captions than to the generally cheery photographs. I'm glad the days of women draping themselves over boats and cars are over, and I wouldn't be sorry to see page 3 disappear, but I think there are more troubling matters for feminists to worry about.

The No More Page 3 campaign believes, however, that the easy accessibility of what it describes as soft porn helps to shape men's view of women and diminishes their respect. Given the oafish behaviour detailed in Everyday Sexism, it is a fair argument.

The banknote campaign is different and, whisper it softly, I don't think it serves the feminist cause very well. You can never be equal if you need or demand special treatment.

The Bank of England clearly didn't think too long or hard, if at all, about the gender of the next person to be honoured on the £5 note. And that's a good thing.

In whatever walk of life or area of society, people should be treated in the way merited by their actions and achievements. It's a shame there will no longer be a woman other than the Queen on our currrency, but it would have been a greater shame if whoever chose the replacement for Elizabeth Fry had thought 'We'd better have another woman.'


Criado-Perez. Photograph: audioboo.fm

Caroline Criado-Perez has worked ferociously and tenaciously to garner nearly 30,000 signatures for her 'keep a woman on English banknotes' petition. That's some achievement, but no more than might be expected from Ms C-P, who is, by all accounts, one smart cookie. The Oxford graduate describes herself as a furious feminist and she is particularly angered by the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in the media. She has set up a website to ensure that female experts are available to offer opinions on any number of issues, she runs a blog with the slogan 'a pox on the patriarchy', and works as a freelance journalist - all the while studying for her master's.

In the course of her banknote campaign, she has written repeatedly to Sir Mervyn King, publishing the correspondence, and appeared in every national paper, the Huffington Post and on radio and television stations all over the country. Her efforts have wrong-footed the Governor to the point where he has been forced to say that the Bank has a contingency plan for someone other than Sir Winston Churchill to feature on the fiver and that Jane Austen is 'quietly waiting in the wings' to make her appearance.

Between them, they've stirred the pot so that every paper seems to be running 'Which woman should be on the banknote?' features. The same half dozen names appear at every turn - Mary Seacole, Ada Lovelace, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosalind Franklin, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and the blessed Jane.

Odd that, isn't it? Well no. Asked to name great British women, most people run out of steam after Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry, as the Bank seems to have done. Yet I'd bet that anyone could rattle off ten times as many men in sixty seconds flat - and be aware of why they were in the frame. You can see how easy it was for the Bank to fall into the trap.

My problem with the debate is the letter 'a'.
Keep a woman on English banknotes
Which woman should be on the fiver?

Imagine if that has been 'which man should be on the fiver?' Or 'which black/gay/blind person...'

This isn't equality, it's tokenism. It's as though the feminists are saying 'We don't care who it is, we just want a woman', while those (presumably men) commissioning the newspaper articles are saying 'If you were allowed one, who should it be?'

There have been many, many great men through British history - and rather fewer great women. There is an interesting debate to be held on what should be the criteria for recognition on a banknote, but gender ought not to be one of them. Should candidates be instantly recognisable to all Britons? Towering giants of the arts, science, social reform? People of international renown? Or people whose retrospective importance outweighs their fame?


If  the women's cause is to be advanced, then the latter needs to be emphasised. That way we would highlight the achievements of people whose efforts have been under-reported and under-estimated for decades. People like Rosalind Franklin, above, whose DNA X-ray work provided the vital key to the mapping of the human genome. She was sneered at and patronised in the lab by Crick and Watson, who danced off to collect their Nobel prizes and then took a quarter of a century to make grudging acknowledgement of her contribution.

Had Ms Criado-Perez approached the Bank (and the media) with an extensive list and said 'You know there are so many unsung British women who achieved great things, how about raising their profile by putting them [not "one of them"] on the currency?' she might have found that the door opened easily. The Bank would probably have been grateful for the suggestions.

Instead we have a campaign that has the air of women stamping their feet shouting 'It's not fair.'

And that means we also have men patting us on the head saying 'Calm down, dear, we'll give you that Pride and Prejudice woman next time...

'Now get back to the hoovering.'



SubScribe also writes about feminism in the posts The truth is never pure and rarely simple and Women's rights and wrongs.

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Sunday, May 19, 2013

Will safety deal help us to find ethical clothing?

Big brands sign up to try to prevent another disaster


 This post was published by SubScribe on May 17, 2013

 Three weeks ago 1,127 people were killed when an eight-storey factory block collapsed in a Dhaka suburb. The victims were largely garment trade workers, most of them making clothes for the Western market.

This week 31 big-name Western clothing chains endorsed a fire and safety accord designed to ensure that such a tragedy never happens again. Between them, these chains buy from more than a thousand factories in Bangladesh. Campaigners were delighted with their haul and declared it a watershed, the dawn of a new era. 

Wow, that was quick! You wouldn't have thought it possible. Well, it's without doubt an achievement, but it wasn't quite that quick and it is sadly unlikely to be a cure-all.

The idea for the accord grew not from the Rana Plaza disaster last month, but from a series of fatal fires culminating in one that killed more than a hundred workers at the Tazreen factory in the city last November.
In January this year, the Dhaka Government, garment manufacturers and workers' organisations agreed to work together to produce an action plan to improve fire safety at work across the country. A committee was formed and its recommended strategy was approved by the Government at the end of March.



That basically called on ministers, employers and workers to recognise and fulfil their responsibilities and for outside organisations - such as brands and international development agencies - to be encouraged to join the party. PHV, which is behind Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, and the German company Tchibo signed up straight away.

The latest tragedy gave the campaign for action added impetus, and a deadline of midnight on Wednesday was set for retailers to sign up. The fact that so many household names did so in the final 48 hours, with H&M leading the charge, suggests that a tipping point may have been reached. Customers are demanding action and more information about the clothes they buy.

The accord aims to establish a new inspection regime that places makes the retailer as well as the factory owner and the Government take responsibility for workers' safety. Stores will be expected to put up to $500,000 a year into the project and to contribute towards work needed to bring factories up to standard.
If manufacturers fail to meet the required standards, the retailer will have to stop doing business with them.
The agreement also aims to give workers more muscle. They should be trained in fire safety practices and be allowed to refuse, without penalty, to work in a building if they fear that it is unsafe. Health and safety committees are to be set up at factories and workers should make up half the representatives.

So far, so good. Even better is the fact that implementation is intended to start immediately and that it should be well on the road by the end of next month. A steering committee is to be set up to get things moving, with its major task the appointment of an independent safety inspector 'with fire and building safety expertise and impeccable credentials'.

Workers and the exporters will have equal representation on the steering committee, whose chairman will come from the International Labour Organisation. The factory bosses are excluded from this area, although they will have seats on the advisory board that will discuss strategy and - with luck -  build stronger relations between the various interested parties. They will also be represented on the committee that actually runs the show.

The Government has meanwhile promised new laws by the end of the month. The minimum wage is to be raised  - at £25 per month, Bangladeshi clothing factory workers are the lowest paid in the world - and  the ban on the unionisation of factories is to be loosened. It has also said that it will train 200 more safety inspectors by the end of the year - at the moment there are only 50 to cover 200,000 factories (or 18 to cover 100,000, depending on whose figures you use).

There are still many hurdles to be overcome, however. Many factories are in Export Processing Zones from which trade unions are banned. If the Government produces its promised legislation  (which is by no means a given) workers will be able to form unions and enter into collective bargaining. Yet it will still not be illegal for employers to fire employees trying to organise workers. How is that going to work? Who is to determine whether people have got together in a reasonable manner or whether they have been suborned by a rabid firebrand?

And always at the back of people's minds will be the torture and murder last year of Aminul Islam, a local president of the garment workers' federation. His killer has not been brought to justice.

We are a long way from happy families here. Factory owners have a huge influence on the Government - both inside and outside of parliament. About half  of the country's MPs have business links and a tenth own  clothing factories. They are hostile to trade unions and will not like their central role in the new regime.

Nor are they too happy with their customers, the big-name buyers from the West who have been pushing them on prices. Costs have risen over recent years, even before the promised reforms, but prices have been kept low. 'The buyers have not given anything. They just say "increase your productivity",' one owner told Reuters.

Unions and anti-sweatshop campaigners such as War on Want and Labour Behind the Label are understandably impatient for change. But there is an aggressive tone amid the accord celebrations. The main targets for their venom are Walmart and Gap, who have declined to sign up.


Gap said it was ready to sign but was concerned about possible ramifications of the accord being legally binding. It fears - probably quite reasonably, as the New York Times pointed out -  the potential cost should any dispute end up in an American court. Walmart, which owns Asda, said it had already acted by starting its own inspections, including using thermal circuit imaging to check electrical systems. It  has also promised fire safety training for all workers and to publish a list of approved factories and their inspection results. It has not, however, committed any money towards repairs or improvements.

Such explanations, or excuses, cut no ice with campaigners. Paul Jennings, general secretary of UNI Global Union, said: 'Walmart, the world's largest retailer, is out of step. By not signing up, the Walmart brand sinks to a new low.' Tim Noonan of the International Trade Union Federation, accused Walmart of sticking with a system that had failed 'year after year...corporate-sponsored investigations that aren't investigations'.

Murray Worthy, a War on Want campaigner told the Independent that Gap's position was absolutely outrageous and that its objection was a smokescreen that would rip the heart out of the agreement. 'It's a straightforward statement that they don't care at all about the safety of their workers and aren't interested in taking action to put that right.' The Labour MP John McDonnell said people should boycott the shop and that British customers had a duty to force it into action.

Are such complaints justified? Bloomberg Business Week notes that JC Penney had also remained aloof, commenting: 'These companies are concerned about preventing the fires and collapses...but signing a legally binding agreement with built-in systems to resolve disputes that was created with labour unions? That’s too European.'
Photograph by Susie Taylor
The Atlantic
American companies will need a lot of persuading to join in this sort of initiative - and activists know it. On the day of the Rana Plaza disaster, theAtlantic website told the story of a Tazreen fire survivor who was in Washington to try to persuade big chains to act. "I've come to America to tell people that we deserve safe working place, that factories in Bangladesh are no safer for workers than before," Sumi Abedin told the site. Ms Abedin, above, is a powerful ambassador, as Jason Motlagh and Susie Taylor's report testifies:

When a fire engulfed the Tazreen Fashions garment factory in late November, Sumi Abedin was resigned to die. Defying orders from floor bosses to stay at her sewing machine after word got around that a blaze was spreading down below, she and her co-workers ran to the two "women's" exits, only to find them padlocked. Another "male" stairwell was choked with smoke and bodies, forcing her to retreat by the light of a cell phone. 
Amid the screams and confusion, a ventilation shaft offered a way out: a three-story fall to the ground, one that could also be fatal. "I did not jump to save my life; I jumped to save my body," says the 24-year-old, hoping her family could identify her remains. 
Will she be able to sway Walmart, which buys from 279 factories in Bangladesh and is the industry's second-biggest customer, spending $1bn a year in the country?

Shortly before the deadline for signing the safety accord on Wednesday, the company broke off relations with a supplier because documents in the Rana Plaza wreckage included an order dated May 2012 for more than 5,000 pairs of skinny jeans destined for its shops. Walmart had said after the disaster that it had no dealings with factories in the building.

The timing of the announcement and the detailed explanations are interesting. Walmart's supplier was the Canadian company Fame Jeans, which had apparently given an assurance that it had not dealt with Rana Plaza. Walmart said: 'Based upon our policy on unauthorised sub-contracting we are terminating this supplier.' Fame Jeans immediately put up its hands, with Alen Brandman the chief executive, saying: 'It's very clear that Walmart did not authorise me in any capacity to work within this factory.' A 'rogue employee' had placed the order without the knowledge of senior managers. Ah, those rogue employees. You just can't trust them.

Funnily enough, Walmart had severed links with another supplier after the Tazreen fire. Funnily enough documents surfaced showing that a supplier had been buying clothes from that factory. "A supplier subcontracted work to this factory without authorisation and in direct violation of our policies," the company said.

Scott Nova of the Workers Rights Consortium, which monitors workers' rights in factories producing goods for sale in the US, was unimpressed by the coincidence: 'One disaster after another at factories producing Walmart goods, but it's never Walmart's fault. They always have some story about a rogue supplier or sneaky subcontractor.'

Other order dockets found in the Rana Plaza rubble showed that the Spanish Mango chain and the Danish group PWT had both had dealings with the Phantom Tac factory based in the building. Mango said it had requested samples and the order would not have been confirmed until the factory had undergone a successful social audit.

Profit and loss

Retailers have been criticised for their big profit margins, so it is interesting to look at these a little more.

The Mango order was for 12,000 polo shirts at $4.45 (£2.92) each, which it would sell in its British shops for £26 - £30.

PWT had ordered long-sleeved checked shirts at $5.08 (£3.34) each, which would be be marketed under the Jack's label for 25 euros (£21).

Inditex, which owns Zara, operates on a gross margin of 58% - the bald relationship between the cost of the goods and the price for which they are sold. But when other costs - premises, staffing, taxes, shipping etc - are taken into account, this comes down to 16%. H&M's margins are 55% and 9%.

Activists say that the published figures show that they could afford to pay more to see workers' conditions improve without a big increase in the prices in their shops. The TUC was quoted in The Times on Saturday as saying that doubling Bangladeshi workers' pay would add only 2p to the cost of a T-shirt.

The BBC has also looked at margins, taking as its example a pair of $50 jeans for sale in Germany. Breaking down where the money goes, Philip Hampsheir says that 39% ($19.50) goes to the retailer, 16% ($8) in tax, 9% ($4.50) on shipping and 20% ($10) on the denim, buttons, zips etc.

That leaves 16% ($8) to go to the producer, who has to pay his rent, fuel and equipment bills and taxes as well as his workers before taking his share. The BBC puts the cost of manufacture at $6 and the profit at $2.  Some will take this as proof of how Western retailers are squeezing their suppliers, others will question the way that final $8 is split.

Is any of this helpful for the shopper who merely wants to know whether their jeans or T shirt have been made in a sweatshop? Probably not.

And so we come back to the Little Red Sewing Machine and the need for a reliable guide to whether workers are properly paid and decently treated. Remember, the accord that brought whoops of joy this week relates only to safety. That is obviously vital to avoid another tragedy, but even if it brings real change - a big if - we are still a long way from making sure that women are not chained to their sewing machines for 12 hours at a time for a pittance.

And another thing: this accord applies only to Bangladesh. Three people died and dozens were injured or trapped when a factory roof collapsed in Cambodia on Thursday.

It was making trainers for the Western market.


Some facts
The retailers who signed up to the accord are:

Abercrombie & Fitch
Aldi
Arcadia (Top Shop, Top Man, Dorothy Perkins, Burton,
BhS, Miss Selfridge, Outfit, Wallis, Evans)
Benetton
Helly Hansen
H&M
Inditex (Zara)
John Lewis
Lidl
Loblaw (Joe Fresh)
Mango
Marks & Spencer
Mothercare
N. Brown Group (various plus-size labels, Figleaves,
Ambrose Wilson, Heather Valley)
New Look
Next
Primark
PVH (Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger)
Sainsbury's
Shop Direct (Littlewoods, isme)
Tesco

Carrefour (France)
C&A (Germany)
El Corte Ingles (Spain)
Esprit (Hong Kong)
G-Star (Netherlands)
Hesse Natur (Germany)
JBC (Belgium)
KiK (Germany)
Stockmann (Finland)
Switcher (Switzerland)
Tchibo (Germany)
WE Europe (Netherlands)

Recommended reading



The Clean Clothes Campaign's ratings for various companies
http://www.labourbehindthelabel.org/campaigns/item/980


All of which will convince you that it's impossible to tell what's good and what's bad. And that is why we need a reliable label.

Please join the campaign and tweet using the hashtag  #littleredsewingmachine




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One miracle in Bangladesh is not enough



Let's celebrate the rescue of Reshma Akhter, but remember more than 1,000 have died to put cheap clothes on our backs
Reshma Akhter is carried from the wreckage with no broken bones. 

Photograph: nbcnews.com

 This post was first published on SubScribe on May 10, 2013

 Great jubilation today over the rescue of a woman alive after 17 days in the rubble of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh.

 Naturally tomorrow's papers will focus on this 'miracle'. Reshma Akhter, an 18-year-old seamstress, was pulled from what was once the  second floor of the factory building, apparently uninjured. She was well enough to describe how she had hit the wreckage with sticks and rocks to draw attention, but was beginning to despair. 'I never thought I'd see daylight again' will doubtless be the headline in more than a few places.

 Just as I am doing here, papers will give second billing to the dreadful fact that the Dhaka death toll has gone up by a hundred every day this week and is well past a thousand. Nor should we forget that a further eight workers died in another factory fire yesterday.

 The Rana Plaza disaster is now the world's deadliest industrial  catastrophe since the Bhopal gas leak in India killed nearly 4,000 people  in 1984.

 The collapse of the eight-storey building has captured media attention from the first moments, even when the death toll was 'only' 87. The disclosure that workers had been ordered to their machines, even though the building had been declared unsafe because of cracks discovered the day before, made it an even greater outrage than two previous disasters that had, at that point, claimed more lives.

 Journalists are used to dealing with high body counts in Asia. Industrial conditions do not by any stretch of the imagination meet Western standards. We are appalled by Chinese mining disasters and Indian rail tragedies, yet we are inured by their frequency - and by the comfort of knowing 'it's nothing to do with us'.

 We might pause for a moment on bonfire night to think of the children who have lost  limbs in firework factory disasters - and then go and pour ourselves another glass or light the toddler's sparkler.

 We were brought up short last year with the spate of suicides at the Foxconn factory in China; too many of us own Apple products not to realise this was rather too close to home to brush off. But do you remember how many people killed themselves and what the core problems were? No? It's too easy to forget.

 Rana Plaza has made us think more carefully. It may be a five-minute burst of conscience, but something tells me this may be the moment that serious consideration of ethical shopping reaches  beyond the realms of the bearded sandal-wearing veggie hippies and into the mainstream.

 Shoppers want to support ethical traders, but everyone in the fashion industry says it is too complex, that it is almost impossible to follow the manufacturing chain. How can you unravel the spider's web woven by the factories where the clothes are made, the shippers, the farmers who grow the cotton, the people who make the buttons? It's not like checking that pigs are being fed decent swill or that chickens aren't penned up in batteries. Or so I've been told.

 Well maybe it isn't simple, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We have to find a way first to convince high street retailers - and not just the specialist cottage industry businesses - to make the effort to get fully involved in monitoring their suppliers.

 Yes it's hard to check up on factories thousands of miles away in countries where bribery and corruption rules, where certification can't be trusted and where codes and signals thwart independent inspectors.

 It seems that when the musack changes, overseers don white coats and goggles and take over on the production line from the children being ushered out of the back door. If the lighting suddenly become brighter, office staff dig out one of several sets of 'official' papers so that they have the 'right' audit for the 'right' buyer.

 If you are making millions of pounds from your sales, if your profits are soaring by 20% year on year, you need to invest some of that money into bringing a halt to such ruses and taking action yourself and not rely on middle men.

 Associated British Foods, which seems able to monitor suppliers in its food business,  needs to get over to the sub-continent and start paying proper attention to the clothing side - Primark - that is the major source of  its growing profits. And so do other retailers. There's no good going in with a big stick and threatening to source shirts and jeans elsewhere. They need to negotiate, to help the factory owners to understand how everyone could and would benefit if they cleaned up their act.

 And  they need to tell their customers what they are doing.

 There's no use being coy. We are grown up enough to realise there's no instant solution, that conditions won't change overnight. There is a natural fear among brands that if they admit that they source goods from sweatshops or places where child labour is rife, they will be exposed on Panorama or by some intrepid print journalist and be ruined. So the media have to be responsible, too, and look for progress and what is good, not simply at wide-eyed children who make a good photograph - and who might starve if they were forbidden to work.

 People in the West who care about the people who produce their food, clothes, toys, iPads must realise that boycotts will hurt only the workers at the bottom of the production line. That a little progress here and a bit more there is to be encouraged and not sniffed at as inadequate.

 But the Government also needs to engage fully and bring pressure to bear on fellow governments, to offer incentives to drive out corruption. It's a tough task, especially when you consider that at least 10 per cent of Bangladesh's 300 MPs are factory owners and that many government officials also have a financial interest in an industry that is responsible for 80 per cent of the country's exports.

 Dhaka clearly needs to put its own house in order and start by revamping the factory inspection regime. Human Rights Watch reported last year that there were just 18 government inspectors to keep tabs on more than 100,000 Dhaka factories.

 Gameoldgirl has written  two articles on this subject  in the past couple of weeks (you can bet there will be more). The first concerned the circumstances of the disaster, workers' conditions and the predicament shoppers find themselves in when trying to buy ethically.

 I know that the little red sewing machine idea seems simplistic. I know that setting up a regulatory authority can be complicated. I know that it's hard to be certain that every element in the supply chain is squeaky clean. But does that mean it's not worth trying? It was encouraging to find support for the little red sewing machine from the likes of Livia Firth and Luella Bartley, and if more big names in the fashion world were to join the campaign, we could make it fly.

 The second post fleshed out the little red sewing machine idea.

 There is an argument that such labelling wouldn't have prevented the tragedy last month because it would concern only working conditions and sourcing, and not the structure of the building. ABF has not (as I write)  signed up to a code of safety for buildings in spite of a petition signed by tens of thousands urging it to do so. The company says it is pursuing its own course of action. But if it wants customer support, it needs to be open and frank about its approach.

 One know-nothing woman tapping away at a laptop can't save the world, but there are others out there who are thinking along similar lines. The pressure is growing and the issue is beginning to move out of the blogosphere and into mainstream media.

 Events of the past two weeks may have created a momentum that will eventually require our high street chains to look to themselves and come up with real solutions rather than excuses.

 There were people in the 19th century who said the world couldn't function without slaves. There were people in the 20th century who said apartheid in South Africa would never end. There were people in this century who never imagined you could have a computer the size of a paperback.

 Given the evidence of humankind's ability to overcome hurdles and make huge social and technical strides when the will is there, how can we say today that there will never be a fully ethical fashion supply chain?

 If you need convincing of the importance of this issue, look at the collection of pictures below taken since the disaster on April 24, and read this report from the Independent Europe Daily Express of a surviving factory worker's fears for the future.


Please back the campaign by spreading the word, putting forward ideas and tweeting using the hashtag #littleredsewingmachine. 
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The little red sewing machine


This isn't about boycotting Primark or shooting for the impossible;
it's about giving Bangladeshi workers hope and British shoppers help



This was first published on SubScribe on May 1, 2013

The death toll from the Bangladesh factory collapse last week has now passed 400. There is scant hope that anyone else will be rescued from the rubble. As the bodies have been buried, so victims' families, survivors and garment workers from other factories have taken to the streets of Dhaka not to weep and wail, but to assert their right to better treatment.

The people of Bangladesh are not supine starvelings begging for the world's pity. They want to work, to do so for a decent wage in decent conditions, and not to have their lives endangered by greedy and incompetent governments, employers or customers. It isn't a lot to ask.

It seems, however, that it is a lot to give. There have been hastily arranged meetings between government officials, employers' organisations and importers; handouts from chastened Western retailers; mass protests in Dhaka and mini protests outside Primark. Ethical trading organisations have issued statements pointing out that they've been working to improve matters forever and assuring the world that they are doing their best. And the overwhelming impression from this scurry of activity -  so far - has been of the world wringing its hands and sighing: We'd love to do more, but it's soooo complicated...'

By far the most outspoken public figure yet has been the Pope, who pulled no punches today:

"A headline that really struck me on the day of the tragedy was 'Living on €38 a month'. That is what the people who died were being paid. This is called slave labour. Today in the world, this slavery is being committed against something beautiful that God has given us - the capacity to create, to work, to have dignity. How many brothers and sisters find themselves in this situation? Not paying fairly, not giving a job because you are only looking at balance sheets, only looking at how to make a profit. That goes against God.” 



SubScribe pitched its tuppence into the muddy fountain last week with the suggestion that retailers should take a  pro-active role in monitoring the conditions under which their merchandise is manufactured and that goods coming from factories that are properly run should be entitled to attach a little red sewing machine symbol to their labels.



The idea was not intended as a solution to all the problems of sweatshops all over the world. It was meant as a device to inform shoppers as they riffle through the racks. The idea was born from the disclosure that not only Primark and Matalan bought from the three factories in Bangladesh and Pakistan that have killed nearly a thousand workers in the past six months. Gap, Monsoon, Benetton were also among the brands that have been sourcing clothes from the death-plants.

Common sense might tell people that if they buy a T-shirt for a quid or two, it probably hasn't been made in a beautifully lit open-plan building with water coolers and potted palms. But if you pay £30 or £90 for your new shirt or dress, it might be reasonable to assume that it wasn't thrown together in a sweatshop.

And so the little red sewing machine was devised not as a means of punishing Primark, but as a reward for those shops that went out of their way to make sure that they did not profit from others' suffering.

The suggestion aroused much interest - "Great idea!" "Is there a campaign?" "How can we make this work?" and the most gratifying demand from the fashionista Luella Bartley "Little red sewing machine!!!! Now!!!"

The enthusiasm was balanced by scepticism from experts who politely pointed out that there were already labelling systems, that there were inspection regimes, that retailers had already signed up to International Labour Organisation and Ethical Trading Initiative standards. But those systems, those conventions aren't doing the job are they? The workers are still being exploited - and so are the shoppers.

Fairtrade (well actually Traidcraft for clothes) seems to be the only brand where we can be absolutely sure that the vendor has proper contact with the producer - and that is hardly mainstream High Street fashion.

We can trawl through the ethical websites in the hope of learning whether it's OK to buy this label or that, but even these aren't particularly helpful. For example, in 2011 the Labour Behind the Label organisation ran a Let's Clean Up Fashion campaign aimed at making sure workers were receiving a living wage. It graded those companies that responded to its investigation on a five-point scale. Some big names came out with 0, including SuperDry, Reiss, Republic and Paul Smith. The LBL verdict on these read:
"This company did not respond to our request for information, and makes no information available on its website. It is therefore safe to assume the worst - that it has no engagement with ethical trading at all."

The first sentence is factual, the second preposterous. It is safe to assume the worst because a company declines to engage with a lobby group? Surely 'Consumers may draw their own conclusions' would have been fairer?

The claim that there are so many regimes that it would be impossible to pull them together is, I think, exactly the wrong argument to use against the little red sewing machine. Because the inspiration for the idea was the Assured Food Standards tractor. And that was created precisely because there were so many labels and inspection regimes in the food industry that it was felt that someone needed to drive - well - a tractor through to clear the path for the consumer. As it explains on its website:

"Assured Food Standards was established in the spring of 2000, and the Red Tractor was launched in the summer of the same year. At that time the public were faced with a plethora of food standards and labels. AFS and the Red Tractor mark were set up to help harmonise the approach to standard setting and inspection throughout the supply chain and to give the public a mark of quality, safe, affordable food that they could recognise and trust....

We all want to know that the food we are buying is safe and this only comes from knowing where the raw ingredients come from and the standards to which they are produced, which is why all suppliers in the Red Tractor food chain are inspected and certified by an independent professional body."

Naturally it is easier to monitor UK farm production than to check up on factories thousands of miles away, but it should not be beyond the wit of mankind to pull this off. AFS is not a fat quango, but a small organisation set up by farmers, growers and retailers. Associated British Foods, the owners of Primark, claims to have extensive systems in place to make sure that its food products are of top quality. It should be able to do the same for its clothing.

Primark said this week that it carried out annual inspections of its supplier's second-floor factory in the Rana Plaza building, but did not check on the building itself. So its inspection system was so thorough that it was unaware that the owners had permission to build a five-storey building but had bunged another three on top, almost doubling the stress on the foundations and structure?


Attacking Primark is not the answer.
Photograph: War on Want

Boycotting Primark or dresses made in Bangladesh will do no-one any good. When a business is put under financial stress, it is always the workers who pay the price - thousands and thousands in Asia have lost their jobs since the financial crisis in the West reduced demand in the shops and thence for clothes from Bangladesh. 

The pressure needs to be applied on Dhaka, whose successive government policies created the  sweatshop garment industry that accounts for 80 per cent of its exports. The industry has been encouraged to expand in special Export Processing Zones (make our enterprise areas sound positively attractive) to which foreign business are welcomed and  from which trade unions are banned. 

Workers must be allowed to have their voice and the West's retailing giants - the Wal-Marts, the Loblaws, the ABFs, and the Sir Philip Greens - should make sure they have it. The Bangladeshis are perfectly capable of fighting their own battles if they are allowed to elect representatives to put their case in a proper forum without having to resort to the desperation of unrest and even violence.

The big prize requires patience, negotiations and understanding at high levels. It will not be reached quickly. The smaller prize - the little red sewing machine - is more attainable because all it needs is for a group of like-minded industry experts to get together and to set up their own set of standards and their own inspection system. They don't need to look at every factory in the world, just those that supply retailers who want their ethical bona fides recognised.

No shop or chain would be obliged to join in; if Matalan or J.C. Penney or Saks, Fifth Avenue  do not want to  commit to making their own checks on their producers, that is their prerogative. But they might find that shoppers do look out for the symbol that reassures them they aren't unwittingly perpetuating slave labour. And that may encourage more retailers to join the club. We can only hope. 

If you would like to support this idea, please speak up. One way is to tweet, using the hashtag #littleredsewingmachine. And we might just make a difference.


Recommended reading



Ethical websites


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