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Last night’s excellent Blood Sweat and Takeaways saw Brit youngsters working as labourers in the tiger prawn ponds in the jungles of Indonesia and peeling prawns in an export prawn factory.  This programme should be a compulsory feature of the national curriculum – skewering in an hour the yawning financial, social and attitudinal gap between [...]

  Network Clothing is one of the leading manufacturers of handmade crochet and knitwear garments. Since 1994, the company has supplied leading UK and international retailers. Network Clothing has a network of around 3,000 home workers within its supply chain, around 1,000 of whom are active at any given time. Most of the home workers [...]

Yesterday’s BBC3 documentary Blood, Sweat and Takeaways plonked six young Brits onto the production line of a tuna processing factory in Indonesia, with predictable consequences.  The Brits can’t cope with the living conditions, the heat, the factory environment, the tasks they are allocated – they vomit, they faint, they cry, they throw each other through [...]

Labour standards have hit the headlines once again in the UAE, with a new report from Human Rights Watch on the conditions for workers on the flagship development Saadiyat Island, which is off the coast of the country’s capital Abu Dhabi. Entitled ‘The Island of Happiness: Exploitation of migrant workers on Saadiyat Island’,  the report [...]

This week, The Guardian is running a series of articles and videos giving a ‘portrait’ of modern China.  This coincides with the newspaper’s new trial to offer selected Guardian articles in Chinese. On day one, we see a video of the experiences of one migrant worker forced to return from Shenzhen to her parents’ farm [...]

Following the success of last year’s Blood Sweat and T-shirts, the reality TV programme which dropped young fashionistas in Indian garment factories, to experience the working conditions behind their clothes, BBC3 have just announced that they will be transferring the concept to the food supply chain. Starting on Tuesday 19th May 2009, Blood Sweat and [...]

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In the absence of a government body like the UK’s Health and Safety Executive companies in the UAE have formed a partnership to share information on health and safety risks and best practices. In operation since October 2007 Build Safe UAE (BSU), as the partnership is known, now has 88 membership organisations from all phases [...]

This week talks in the European Parliament about amendments to the Working Time Directive broke down, meaning that the UK will keep the opt-out of the 48 hour working week indefinitely. The news will be welcomed by business groups who have long held that a working week which can be flexible and extended if workers [...]