ACTION: Labour rights violations at Arcadia supplier
Tuesday, 14 August 2007 17:31
Mauritian workers interviewed by the Sunday Times have described appalling conditions at two factories supplying the Arcadia Group, including one producing T-shirts for the flagship Kate Moss range. Most of the workers interviewed at Star Knitwear and Compagnie Mauricienne de Textile (CMT) are migrant workers, recruited by agents in their home countries with a promise of higher wages, stable contracts and a better standard of living than they could find at home. Once there they find the reality is very different: low salaries, long hours and crowded, unhygienic living conditions. Any workers demanding better conditions risk not only unemployment but deportation.
At the other end of this chain sit Mr Green and Ms Moss. Philip Green, the owner of Arcadia Group which includes TopShop, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge, is one of Britain's richest men, worth nearly £5 billion. Kate Moss was paid £5 million to design the clothes now being stitched together by some of the workers interviewed by the paper.
The Arcadia Group can and should to do more to ensure the workers at the sharp end of their supply chains are getting a fairer slice of the pie. These workers need you to take action and demand that workers producing for Arcadia in Mauritius and elsewhere get a better deal.
Read the Sunday Times article>>
Workers at the two factories investigated by the Sunday Times are recruited from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, China and India and often have to pay up to £725 to get the job - in return they are promised a three year contract for a job paying substantially more than they could hope to earn at home. Many mortgage their land or homes to get the money together. Once there though it seems the promises made were less than honest. One worker from Sri Lanka was told she could earn £500 per month, but in reality was paid only £100. Workers from Bangladesh earn even less, often below £70 per month. Factory owners claim this is because they have lower wages and in their home country and are less skilled than workers from India or Sri Lanka. At one of the factories workers contracts allow the factory to keep one fifth of their salaries until the three year contract is completed. Workers do receive the free bed and board promised, but many have to share a 20ft by 30ft room with up to 50 other workers and the 10 available toilets (of which a number are often broken) with over 900 of their colleagues.
Far away from their families and homes and often needing to work to pay off the money spent to get the job in the first place these workers are extremely vulnerable. Any attempts to complain or speak out have led to workers not only being fired but deported from the country. "Many workers are scared to speak out about conditions" explains Fayzal Ally Beegun, a local union official, "they have seen other workers sent home after complaining." Workers such as the 100 Chinese workers at the CMT factory deported after going on strike. Or lthe hundreds of Sri Lankan workers who were deported following a strike at the same factory earlier this year.
"They took us to the airport and left us there for three days" said Amali, one of the Sri Lankan workers deported after the strike. "We could not travel. We had no tickets. Armed gunman ... came and threatened us.... We were then kept in a camp [until] 174 of us were given tickets and told to leave".
Unlike most of its high street competitors the Arcadia Group has still refused to sign up to the Ethical Trading Initiative . Although the code of conduct on their website is similar to the ETI base code, evidence from this and other reports suggest the reality for workers within their supply chains are quite different. Until Arcadia starts seriously addressing these problems by working with others in the industry and by actually talking to workers themselves this situation is unlikely to change anytime soon.
Most of the information here was taken from a report in the Sunday Times published on August 12th 2007.
Read the full Sunday Times article here [ http://tinyurl.com/27bysl]
See more information on the Arcadia Group
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