No Sweat vs the corporate giants

Over six years ago No Sweat joined forces with the GMB London region and headed down to London’s east end to investigate the level of sweatshop activity in garment industry.

A team of three No Sweat activists walked the streets of the Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets, talking to workers outside factories about their working conditions, the hours they are expected to work and the low wages they receive. What the workers told us about the companies they worked for suggested many of the factories in the region could be classified as sweatshops; they were paying below the minimum wage, breaching health and safety laws and denying their staff trade union representation. At the time the minimum wage stood at £4.10 for workers over the age of 21, many of the factories we investigated were paying their workers as low as £3.50, some even as low as £2.66. Time and time again workers told us about the crap conditions they were expected to work under, the poor air conditioning, severe overcrowding, excessive noise levels and heating cause by the machinery.

We then started walking into the factories to see the conditions for ourselves. And the situations we found were worse than we’d expected. Many of the factories were housed in buildings that looked as if they dated back to the late 19th or early 20th century, and hadn’t had maintenance work done to them since then. Dank, rickety stairways led up from the street that also served as the only fire escape in the buildings, any others being padlocked and blocked by machines, leading into rooms crowded by machinery and piles of clothes. Other factories were small buildings, often with only a ground level, comprising of several small rooms, again crammed with machinery and clothing. In some cases there were only a few workers present and in others people were packed in from wall to wall. In all cases ventilation didn’t exist, or if it did it certainly didn’t appear to work. One factory in particular, producing leather garments, held over a dozen men in a small room, surrounded by machinery, it was hard to move for the piles of leather left waiting to be processed and the smell was so overpowering it left us feeling sick and clamouring for fresh air.

We passed the details of this factory and 15 others like it that we had investigated on to the GMB Organiser Martin Smith who reported the offending companies to the National Minimum Wage Team of the Inland Revenue and to the Tower Hamlets Environmental Health Office, whilst simultaneously making attempts to unionise these sweatshop workers to protect them from future abuses in the work place. The results of these actions were mixed. In two cases the company had already ceased trading, in some cases the companies proved themselves legally to be complying with the National Minimum Wage Act, but in several cases they were not and over £1,200 was paid to workers in arrears.

But the biggest surprise of the campaign (to some at least) came in one small factory just off the Whitechapel High Road. In one of those old, decrepit buildings that looked like it had never ceased being a sweatshop since the Victorian era, workers were being paid £3.75 an hour, working in the same dilapidated conditions as other factories we’d visited, produced clothes for Topshop. Clothes awaiting labels were hanging from racks in the factory and up at the top of the stairway boxes containing hundreds of Topshop coat hangers sat piled up in front of a chained up door marked ‘Fire Exit’. This was the proof that big brand sweatshops were not just something that existed in far off countries with ‘underdeveloped economies’; they existed in the richest countries of the world too, in our own back yard!

The campaign had begun after the Indonesian sweatshop worker and activist, Dita Sari, had thanked No Sweat for our solidarity during the 5000 strong sweatshop workers strike she helped organise but then asked “what about sweatshops in your country?”. The No Sweat/GMB East End Sweatshop Campaign was launched and had resulted in exposing Topshop as a sweatshop abuser.

Philip Green, who owns Arcadia, the retail giant that owns Topshop along with many other high street stores, found out that his company had been exposed after the GMB passed on our findings to the Evening Standard. His reaction was to declare ignorance and state that the clothes would be burned! A moronic reaction if ever there was one. We suggested he sell the clothes and simply give the workers a decent living wage and better, healthier working conditions.

The fact that in August of 2007 The Sunday Times published an article that stated Topshop clothes are made by “Sri Lankan, Indian and Bangladeshi workers in Mauritius where they labour for up to 12 hours a day, six days a week [and] receive as little as 22p to 40p an hour, about 40% below the local average wage” suggests the old grinch Green didn’t listen to us back in 2002.

In fact, at a No Sweat demo a few years ago, outside his main Topshop branch on Oxford St, where we were using the Evening Standard article to highlight the evidence of the companies prior involvement in sweatshop labour, Green happened to be inside. He came out fuming and ranting that the East End scandal had all been sorted out…
It seems he was telling the truth, he sorted it out by shipping it overseas!

Out of sight out of mind, eh Phil!

So in the summer of 2007, 5 years later, No Sweat once again joined forces with the GMB and went back to the East End to see how the garment industry had changed in these parts. At 8 o’clock one lovely summer’s morning we retraced our steps around Aldgate and Whitechapel looking for the companies that were still trading. Few were still there, some had probably changed their name, but many had long since disappeared.

A comment that a worker had made outside a factory back in 2002, when we stopped him to talk about working conditions came to mind at this point he said, “it’s all over for this place, in five years it’ll be dead.” From what we could see then he was right. There are still plenty of East End companies involved in the garment industry but after talking to some of these companies the only a handful still manufacture on site, the majority import the clothes from the Far East, some indicated their clothes are manufactured in north England towns, though none admitted to working for high street stores; only local shops and market traders. The common phrase used during discussions was “the East End is finished for manufacturing.”

But this isn’t to say the fight is over. Sweatshop exploitation still exists in the world, and the investigation in to sweatshop labour in northern England’s garment industry recently found Primark using similar conditions in Manchester as Topshop had In London. Dita Sari’s suggestion that we fight to end the exploitation of workers at home as well as abroad must continue, just as we continue to give our solidarity to workers suffering exploitation at the hands of the big brands around the world. There is still so much to be done!

No Sweat exists to put pressure on Topshop, Primark and the other big brands and make them listen to us when we say we won’t stand for sweatshop exploitation, not here in the UK or anywhere in the world!
Its time to get active!