The real price of your £5 jeans: LIZ JONES meets the children still making clothes for Primark

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1295737/The-real-price-5-jeans-LIZ-JONES-meets-children-making-clothes-Primark.html

By Liz Jones
Last updated at 1:44 AM on 19th July 2010

This shop is a giant on the High Street. It has bucked the recession, announcing ever bigger profits. It prides itself on being the best friend of the hard-working, fashion-conscious mum.

But who can forget that two years ago, Primark was caught with its three-pairs-for-one knickers down when a documentary revealed it had been using child labour.

Primark apologised. It swore this would never happen again.


The faces of child labour: Liz Jones meets young workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh

But a Life&Style investigation in Dhaka, Bangladesh, can reveal it has happened again.

Primark — as well as other famous names on the British High Street — has been sacrificing basic human rights on the altar of the fast and the fashionable and the dirt cheap.

Rewind two weeks and I’m standing on the brink of hell. A short taxi ride from my hotel in central Dhaka, Bangladesh, where my biggest problem was that I couldn’t get the top off the hair conditioner, it’s as though I’ve been transported to the Middle Ages.

I’m on the edge of one of Dhaka’s biggest slums: Kuni Para, in the north of the city — home to 18,000 people.

In front of me are three pieces of bamboo, propped above a sea of raw sewage and litter, and that reaches into the warren of corrugated iron. It’s 7am and already it’s nearly 40 degrees. The stench is overpowering. It’s drizzling, and the bamboo is slippery: one false move and I will tumble into the fetid soup.


Shanty hell: The shacks where workers earning at little as £15 a month live

FULL story at link.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. Do we EVER really learn?

I guess not.

Recommended.

[malaise]

5. No

The mega rich always exploit people.

[pleah]

2. K&R Apparently we will never learn. :( nt

[sandnsea]

3. 2005 factory collapse

Killed 64 people. There is more outrage in this country over Michelle Obama showing her arms than the conditions of the people making the clothes. And I bet some of their clothes come from these factories too, it's hard to get away from it.

[Ozymanithrax]

4. The same is true here in the good old U.S. of A.

If it isn't 100% made on our shores, then it is being made by people in similar or worse conditions.

Wallmart, Kmart, Target, and every other big store exists because almost everything we buy there is made in places like this.

Slavery isn't dead, we just off shored that industry to meet our insatiable need to consume.

[Luminous Animal]

8. +1. There is a tragic price human beings are paying for

our the West's quest for the cheapest goods.

[virgogal]

6. The kiddie bikinis probably were made by children too.

What a slimey company.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/14/bikini_rumpus/

[Yuugal]

7. Free trade rocks!