No Sweat - How To Get Involved

You can join No Sweat by sending £5 (cheques and POs to "No Sweat", please) to PO Box 36707, London SW9 8YA or join online.

This entitles you to No Sweat mailings and votes at our meetings and conferences.

Union branches and other local campaigning organisations can affiliate to No Sweat. The normal rate is £50 per year. If your organisation cannot afford this, send us a donation.

The normal affiliation rate for national trade unions and other national organisations is £500. Seven national trade unions - the CWU, NUT, RMT, Unison, GMB, Usdaw and PCS - now back No Sweat. The National Union of Students (NUS) is also affiliated.

Please also print out our Standing Order form, and agree to send No Sweat a little money every month to help with our regular campaigns, and the development of this website, the leaflets, stickers and other stuff we send out to people who ask us for info, and so on.

Please propose the motion, below, to your union branch. You can amend it, cut it or re-word it to suit your circumstances.

Union Branch resolution: Sweatshop Labour

1. Child and sweatshop labour is a scandal.

2. Some of the high street's most famous names, including Nike, Gap, Adidas and Reebok, have been exposed by the newspapers, and TV programmes such as Panorama and John Pilger's The New Rulers, as sweatshop employers.

3. Children as young as 11 have been found working in scandalous conditions in factories commissioned by these companies to produce their goods.

4. A single top or pair of trainers can cost more to buy in the UK than the worker who produced them receives in a month. The average wage for a Nike worker in Vietnam is just $47 a month.

5. According to the US National Labor Committee, Phil Knight, co-founder of the Nike corporation, is worth $12.3 billion.

6. Forced overtime, sexual abuse, poor health and safety conditions and violence and harassment, especially against trade unionists, have been uncovered by reporters and trade union and Government investigators.

7. No Sweat campaigns in the UK, with other campaigning groups and unions, to end child and sweatshop labour and for workers' rights at home and abroad.

8. Workers in sweatshops must be free to organise their own, independent trade unions. Codes of conduct mean nothing unless the workers themselves can enforce standards such as a limit to the working week, no forced overtime, decent health and safety.

This Union Resolves To:

1. Invite a No Sweat speaker to our next meeting.

2. Affiliate to No Sweat.

3. Publicise the work of No Sweat.