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As the financial crisis deepens, it raises serious questions regarding the people at the bottom of supply chains who have to cater to the growing global demand for cheaper products. How does the crisis affect them? And who exactly does it affect? Will children be hit the hardest?
A new report [More…]

The BBC series Blood Sweat & Takeaways came to a close last week.  For the final episode the documentary picked the 6 young Brits up in the rice-farming regions of Thailand and followed them to the bustling capital of Bangkok.  This migration from the countryside is undertaken by many where the city holds potential [More…]

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 [More…]

 
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 [More…]

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 [More…]

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 [More…]

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 [More…]

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 [More…]

We maintain a large database of relevant news stories, blogs and resources on a wide range of topics:

Ethical trade
Labour standards
Working conditions
Gangmasters
Migrant labour

The database currently holds over 3000 stories and is updated daily and covers stories from across the globe.  We tag and categorise these stories using our Delicious account. [More…]

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 [More…]