Minutes of No Sweat's June steering meeting
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Submitted by blobubl on June 8, 2011 - 12:52pm.
Minutes, No Sweat steering, Monday 6 June 2011
Attending: David, Neil, Karen, Vicki, Vino
Apologies: Aine
1. Comedy gig: half the tickets sold with a month to go so it looks good. We haven't paid a lot for advertising either. Discuss arrangements for the night at the next meeting.
2. Festivals:
London Green Fair was useful for networking and checking our stock, but it was wet and we made a small loss. The Saturday with nice weather was busier!
Tolpuddle: Karen, Vicki and poss Aine going. Need to have a plan B for getting stuff down there if Jean can't accommodate all in her car. Ask around.
Portsmouth: we hadn't heard back from R so assume we are not doing it.
Laura might be doing Rebellion in the north west. Vicki check with her and also whether there is any follow-up from Groezrock in Belgium (where we went down a storm!)
General: people please look out for other cheap/free fairs we can do.
3. Primark leaflets: agreed to get a reprint.
4. Egypt tour: Kamal Abbas meetings in Liverpool were packed and interesting. The speakers told us they would send contacts for women's organisations in Egypt as this was something we wanted to follow up on. Vicki chase them.
5. Website: we discussed what improvements needed doing and David reported on finding people who might work on it.
6. UK Uncut type protests: new date set for Capita HQ protest Thursday 7th July. Vicki working on this with London anti-cuts groups. Idea is to target MNCs who are bidding for outsourced council services. Need to put something on website about this - Vicki send some material to David/Neil.
7. Fundraising: brief discussion about difficulties with seeking funds from Trusts, etc., to explain why we don't do it.
Next meeting: (provisional) Monday 4 July
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Chinese or Italian tonight?
Sweatshops in Italy using Chinese workers seem to be big business for the Mafia (plenty of press sources on Google in recent years, although not yet on No-Sweat!). E.g:
"Shi Songbin’s existence in Italy came to light one morning in the Via Barsanti in the town of Prato only when stunned residents found his body outside an underground car park surrounded by drab apartment blocks.
“Dumped like a bag of rubbish,” commented a local newspaper, reporting on the third such corpse to materialise within two weeks. The dead are the previously unseen faces of a vast and largely clandestine network of Chinese-run garment factories in the heart of Tuscany.
Investigators suspect Shi, a 29-year-old Chinese illegal immigrant, died from an overdose of the drugs he took to keep him working on a gruelling day-long shift. His shadowy employers disposed of him in the street to avoid calling the attention of the authorities to their anonymous sweatshop.
Prato – a medieval jewel of a town once renowned for its textile industry – has been transformed into an example of how economic globalisation and weak government have combined to fuel the development of black economies on the southern and eastern fringes of Europe."
That’s from the FT of 10 June 2011:(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/efc3510e-9214-11e0-9e00-00144feab49a.html#axzz...).
There’s a detailed first-hand account of the plight of Chinese workers in sweatshops run by the Camorra mafia in Roberto Saviano’s 2007 book “Gomorrah” which is worth a read - if only to understand why sweatshops don't get eradicated.