The issue driving the development of this work is that health and social care in the UK has the potential to damage the health of workers in poorer countries through the procurement of health supplies manufactured under poor labour standards, including child labour and inadequate wages.

Impactt was disappointed to read the Guardian report which focused more on the ‘exposure’ of labour standards issues than on the work of the NHS to develop innovative guidance on tackling those issues. We echo the support of Dr Mahmood Bhutta who revealed the presence of poor labour standards in surgical instrument manufacture in 2006.

Ethical Procurement for Health can be applied to a much broader range of products and services than just surgical instruments. The NHS spends more than £20 billion per annum on goods and services ranging from rubber gloves and surgical instruments to cleaning services and IT contracts. The EPH gives organisations within the NHS the opportunity to influence improvements in labour standards across all healthcare supply chains. As Health Minister Ben Bradshaw noted, Britain’s health service is “in a strong position to influence improvement in labour standards across health care supply chains.”

The Guardian article also suggests the guidelines are voluntary. In a sense they are, but as government agencies, NHS Trusts are obliged to meet all ILO conventions that have been ratified by the UK. The UK Government’s Global Health Strategy (September 2008) recognises a responsibility to harness the opportunities of globalisation to improve the health of people across the world. The EPH provides step by step practical guidance for procurers to meet these obligations.

It must be recognised that all organisations differ and no single approach will be right for all NHS Trusts. The guidance can be used as a tool to develop solutions for each individual organisation which meets their needs whilst working towards improved labour standards in the supply chain. Ethical procurement has to be supported and owned locally if it is to be effectively implemented at the level of individual organisations.

The Lancet stated that this ‘ground breaking’ work could create a model for other countries to follow in ensuring that public procurement was sensitive to labour standards issues. We congratulate NHS PASA and the ETI on the development of this guidance and hope that it will act as a spur for future developments in ethical procurement within the NHS.

As part of Impactt’s launch of our Asia Pacific Network we are issuing a series of viewpoints identifying the most pressing labour standards issues in our network countries. Our first viewpoint comes from Juliet Edington our associate in Vietnam and focuses on the impacts of high inflation on workers’ livelihoods.

This year the issue of wages has been particularly problematic due to inflation which stands at approximately 30% up on last year. Furthermore analysis done at a factory in south Vietnam recently showed that the price of essential goods (e.g. rice, eggs, sugar, salt, petrol, cooking oil etc) went up an average of 47% between March and June this year alone  Petrol prices have increased by a staggering 145% in just three months. 

Despite the legal minimum wage having been raised twice in the past two years, a very conservative look at a worker’s cost of living reveals the minimum wage at a Vietnamese owned factory provides only 68%, at best, of the money that a single worker needs to survive. This is not including any money for the family, any medical expenses, education, clothes or any remittances. Workers can simply no longer live on their wages without working excessive overtime hours. 

Vietnam is starting to see a return of workers walking or cycling rather than riding motorbikes to work. The poor level of wages is resulting in chronic labour shortages in many areas which are in turn resulting in excessive overtime hours for those workers that factories can recruit and retain.

Furthermore according to a report in the International Herald Tribune, some factory workers are returning to the countryside, unable to sustain an urban life on a factory wage.

The labour shortage is resulting in some emerging cases of child labour in Vietnam. Young workers aged 13 or 14 years old are now to be found working in factories, a situation which was previously only rarely seen. Factories are finding it harder to recruit workers. They are being less rigorous in their checks of those applying to work. The low wages are also forcing parents to take their children out of school and get them into work.

The question is can the inflation and labour shortages divert Vietnam off its development trajectory, or is this a short term issue and Vietnam’s growth and economic restructuring will continue apace in the long term?

Our main beef with the programme was its failure to give workers a voice.  The only time any worker spoke was to confirm their age. We are therefore none the wiser about how workers (adults and children) felt about their situation.  Whilst the conditions shown in the film were far from ideal, the people stitching the garments may well be dependent on their earnings from this work.  Getting their view on how Primark could improve their lot would have been useful.  It would certainly have make it harder for the Tirapur Export Association to release a statement alleging that the children captured on film were not actually working.

Hand embellishment of garments in India is almost invariably subcontracted to informal units or homeworkers, carrying the risk of child labour.  We welcome the clear view Panorama gave us down these supply chains.  The overwhelming public and consumer reaction to the film has been to urge companies to stay in and work with their suppliers and workers on these difficult issues.  Criticism of Primark has been focused on the decision to ‘cut and run‘ rather than on the discovery of problems in the first place. Maybe it’s time to move on from denial and distancing towards a more grown-up approach of engagement and improvement.

Following the news stories last week and speculation in the Ethical Trading community, the BBC is set to show its investigation into the ethical standards of Primark’s supply chain this Monday at 9pm. A potentially controversial trailer is available on YouTube:

The footage shows outsourced finishing in the backstreet slums of India and child labour in Tamil refugee camps usually closed to outsiders. The programme uncovers organised middlemen running off-the-record order books for a factory supplying Primark and distributing finishing work amongst slum-workers.

The documentary raises important questions about low-cost fashion and how it is produced; but we wonder whether it is just low-cost fashion retailers who are vulnerable to these practices. This depiction is reminiscent of the Gap exposé last October which revealed child labour in unknown subcontracted factories. As we commented last year, if Gap could be caught in a situation like that, after developing arguably one of the most comprehensive ethical trading programmes in the industry, any company sourcing from India could be caught out. Clearly controlling supply chains is well-nigh impossible.  We at Impactt think that it is time for another approach.  The need is to identify these informal supply chains, which after all provide some income for very poor people, to develop ways to keep adults in the supply chain, but working under better conditions and to support working children back to school, whilst maintaining the family’s income.

Primark’s response to the allegations has been to drop three suppliers for using undeclared subcontractors. Primark have a point here, since the suppliers are in breach of their agreement – however, walking away is never going to solve the problem.  This type of action will leave adults without jobs and the children caught in the media glare in an even more vulnerable position.  To be fair, Primark has announced its intention to establish the ‘Primark Better Lives Foundation’, which will provide financial assistance to organisations devoted to improving the lives of young people; whether or not this will address the needs of the children found in their subcontracted factories remains to be seen.

This latest news only adds to the pressure on the company’s ethical standards following recent unwanted attention after the cancellation of Alexa Chung’s sweatshop experiment in Covent Garden entitled ‘The Devil Wears Primark’. The programme was cancelled by Channel 4 at very short notice at the beginning of June, leaving many viewers disappointed that a seemingly promising exposé of the garment industry was instead replaced by Without a Paddle – a film about a camping trip.

The child labour issue and the focus of the television documentary coincide with the release of a Primark video on its specially created ethics website ‘Ethical Primark’, which aims to dispel some of the assumptions about the company’s purchasing practices and how it manages to keep its prices so low. Entitled ‘How Do They Do It’ the video talks about the company’s business model – claiming that low margins, no advertising expenditure and economies of scale, rather than compromising on product quality or working conditions, help to keep prices down.

According to the article, children in the cotton fields work up to 10-hour shifts in the 40 degree heat for 20 pence per day near the Fayoum Oasis, 90km south of Cairo. The youngest are just seven years old. The plants which they tend, searching for insects and pests which could destroy the harvest, are drenched in dangerous pesticides.

Egypt’s cotton exports are worth £150million per year. World cotton prices, however, have been falling over the past fifteen years, partly due to over-supply and partly due to subsides given to American farmers by the world’s largest cotton producer.

Egypt’s 1996 Child Law bans the employment of children under the age of 14, and regulates the hours and conditions of those between the age of 15 and 17. However child labour is rife, as many families live in poverty. According the UN 17% of Egypt’s 77.5 million people live below the poverty line.

Egyptian cotton is the most prestigious and luxurious type of cotton. Its long fine and elastic fibres make the softest sheets and towels. Marks and Spencer’s, John Lewis, Habitat, Ikea and Tesco now have Egyptian cotton ranges. The article relates how The Observer phoned companies sourcing cotton. Whilst they could provide answers on the factory conditions where their ranges were made, they were at a loss to communicate what they were doing to support change at the level of the cotton fields. Only M&S said they were working with the independent Better Cotton Initiative, which is working to set better social and environmental standards in the cotton industry.

Campaigners and the media are pushing retailers to investigate conditions further down the supply chain than the factory level. Commodity markets present a range of challenges to companies attempting to ensure better labour standards in their supply chains. Not least of which is the issue of transparency and traceability. Nevertheless the public expect companies to be finding solutions to these problems and working towards making a difference at this level.

This builds on the Environmental Justice Foundation‘s campaign on Uzbek cotton last year, which ultimately led to Tesco’s decision to pull out of sourcing any cotton from Uzbekistan.

There is a certain irony that the Guardian is currently advertising its own range of Egyptian cotton sheets!

Tomorrow (12th June) is the World Day Against Child Labour, and hundreds of organisations around the world are marking the day with activities to raise awareness that Education is the right response against child labour.

Impactt’s report, Progress not Perfection highlighted the increasing incidence of child labour. Over the last couple of years, we have found children working in around 20% of the factories we have visited, with a total of nearly 600 individual children.  These children have been forced into work by a variety of circumstances.  The background theme is poverty, with the child usually being pushed into work by a catastrophic event in the family, the death of a parent or the pressing need to pay for medicine or the collapse of the family home.  In general, these children’s experience of education has not been very positive, children talk about poor facilities, boring lessons and often harsh punishments from teachers.

Tremendous work is being done to tackle these root causes of child labour, by UNICEF, IPEC, Save the Children and others – we at Impactt have been focussing on the individual level, on getting the children we find back to school, one-by-one.  It’s not easy – sometimes there is difficulty in proving the age of the child, sometimes the factory manager will try to make the children disappear before we can act, sometimes the child doesn’t want to go back to school, sometimes the parents are against it, sometimes no-one is willing to pay for the costs of education, and of maintaining the income of the child whilst they are in school.  Once a child is back at school, there are always loads of reasons why they may be tempted to go back to work.  Our experience in dealing with individual cases of child labour has prompted us to put together a set of draft procedures giving step-by-step guidance on what to do if child labour is found and how to organise remediation to give it the best possible chance of success. 

Over the past 3 months, we have been consulting with academics, local NGOs, international NGOs, trade unions, international bodies and companies themselves on the content of these guidelines and have received some immensely valuable comments from more that 70 organisations, including, amongst others, the University of Manchester, ITGLWF, ILO-IPEC, international and local NGOs and a broad range of practitioners from retailers and brands around the world. We are holding two meetings in June to discuss key areas of agreement and disagreement and to hammer out the detail of an agreed set of procedures.  We had our first meeting on Wednesday at the RSA in London. Impactt, representatives from 20 retailers and brands from the UK and continental Europe, as well as a representative from UNICEF met to share experience and develop the Operational Procedures further. In a couple of weeks, a group of practitioners will gather in Hong Kong to provide their insights. 

We hope that this process will result in some generally agreed procedures so that, when children are found in factory work, the tools will be there to support swift and decisive action, to maximise the chances of those individual children getting out of the workplace and into the classroom, so that they can build better life chances for themselves and their families.

If you are interested in knowing more, please email Magali@impacttlimited.com

This week the young fashionistas found themselves in the slums of Dharavi in Mumbai, where amongst the warren of backstreets and open sewers they saw factories making and embroidering clothes for the UK and US market. In these small backrooms, workers worked from 8am – 10pm in dangerous and unhygienic conditions. The workers were earning about £3.20 a day.

The group were horrified at the low levels of health and safety in the factories.  Stacey, a 20 year old shop assistant from Luton, expressed her horror at the conditions, saying: “a safe working environment, where you’re not going to die of disease is not a lot to ask for.”

As they came to terms with the working environment, and saw how critical these jobs were to workers (who were earning twice the average wage of cotton pickers), they started to change their minds about the factories, realising that there was little point in naming and shaming companies sourcing from these factories, since this would mean the workers might lose their jobs.  As Richard, a 24 year old advertising executive comments: 

“We are not really doing anything wrong as a UK consumer.  If anything we are being a massive help to these guys, because if it wasn’t for us buying their clothes then as people keep pointing out, these guys wouldn’t have a job and if we think that the conditions here are bad now, you wait ‘til all the UK consumers revolt and turn around and say ‘actually we’re not going to buy any clothes from India anymore because we’re not happy with the conditions’ you wait to see what the conditions are like in a year.”

The group discovered that one of the biggest problems in Dharavi, is the use of child labour in the garment industry.  The girls interviewed one of their fellow workers in the factory who had been working in the factory since he was 10.  They joined Satish, an enforcement officer with an NGO working to eliminate child labour in the garment industry.  In one factory they found one young boy hiding behind a loom, he looked no older than 13.  Satish and the girls questioned the boy about his age, and why he was in the factory, as he looked on terrified.  It powerfully demonstrated the importance of dealing with the issue of child labour in a very sensitive manner.  Impactt has developed a series of child labour guidelines which are currently being reviewed in consultation with stakeholders.

The series finished with a visit to a school set up for rescued child labourers, where the children’s young age and vulnerability was starkly evident. 

At the end of this controversial and challenging series, we were extremely pleased to see that some serious issues were raised and difficult questions posed.  The group left India with a better idea of why workers were willing to put up with such poor working conditions and why children are so commonly forced to work.

We thought we should leave the last word to Tara, a budding fashion designer.

“The dilemma that I’ve got is that I really can’t condone the conditions of some of the factories that we’ve visited but I can’t really condemn them because they are providing people with jobs and with roofs over their heads.”

The video presents an extremely powerful message, contrasting the lives of two children so closely.  The music adds beautifully to the sentiment and makes the video  compelling and effective.

The reach of the video is anticipated to be very wide; bloggers have been reporting that the video will be seen by an estimated 560 million households worldwide.

Explaining his involvement in the project, Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, has been quoted as saying “I think it’s important for everyone in the West or on the high street to understand the consequences of our economic activity. You must be aware of the level of exploitation that’s going on,” Yorke said. “It’s part of our Western life, and one we should accept responsibility for. There’s no such thing as a free lunch or a free ticket to another country.”

Radiohead are planning to follow up on the video by asking activists campaigning on human trafficking to distribute information on their upcoming tour.

The video can be seen here

Musicians have a long, and sometimes controversial, tradition of supporting development agendas; just think of Bob Geldof and Live Aid or Bono‘s celebrity endorsed ONE Campaign  ‘the campaign to Make Poverty History’.  Radiohead’s efforts will undoubtedly be compared to the lead singer of Coldplay, Chris Martin‘s, very public support of Oxfam’s ‘Make Trade Fair’ campaign during which he focused on revising the inequitable trade rules between developed and developing countries. By contrast, Radiohead’s approach addresses a difficult subject, seemingly raising more difficult questions about Western consumers’ complicity in the exploitation of workers.

We are pleased that such inspirational and influential artists as Radiohead have chosen to highlight these issues. They have the ability to frame them in new and powerful ways, which can only help in spreading the message to new audiences.

Various media outlets in China including the Southern Metropolitan News, Xinua and Sina (links in Chinese) have been reporting that bonded child labourers have been found being ‘sold like vegetables’ in Shipai, Dongguan.   The working conditions into which they were sold were horrific. The reports allege that:

• There are up to 750 bonded child workers in the Pearl River Delta area.
• Workers as young as 9 years old are sold to factories.
• Young workers are threatened and beaten if they try to escape.
• Child labourers are working over 300 hours a month.
• Hourly rates for young workers are RMB 2.5-3.8 (18p-28p) per hour, with no overtime premiums, no benefits and no weekend rests.

This is the latest in a long line of exposes on the very worst forms of child labour in China.  We at Impactt are finding children in factories more and more often. All too often, shock and lack of information about what to do cause delays in tackling the problem, resulting in children slipping through the net and back into work.  The fate of these lost children has prompted us to develop our draft Child Labour Remediation Guidelines for the industrial context.  These set out some simple steps to for stakeholders to take when children are found in factories with the objective of getting children out of danger and back into school.  We are currently consulting on the guidelines – to give your views please, click here. 

We are all hearing much more about child labour these days.  The hundreds of children trafficked to work in the brick kilns of Shanxi  province in China, and the trafficked child labour in the garment industry in Delhi have recently made the international headlines.  We are also finding child labour more often in our own assessments – uncovering underage workers in 20% of the workplaces we visited globally in 2006-2007.  These experiences make the ILO’s 2006 report ‘The end of child labour: Within reach’ seem overly optimistic.  There seems to be an almost unlimited supply of potential child workers in many of the countries we work in.  As well as tackling the root causes of the problem (poverty, inadequate education provision, family breakdowns, and migration of whole families for work, to name a few), there is an urgent need to develop consensus on practical guidelines on how to tackle individual cases to make a positive outcome for individual children more likely.

On Thursday 6^th March, Impactt held a seminar in Guangzhou to launch our draft child labour remediation guidelines for the industrial context.  What was unusual about this seminar was the presence of a former child worker, now in a remediation programme, studying IT and clearly enjoying it.  The child, who is now 15, talked to the assembled brands, retailers, academics and ethical trading practitioners about his experiences. 

He had left school at the age of 13 because of bullying, lack of supportive teachers, as well as financial difficulties at home.   He started working in the paint spraying department of a toy factory in Dongguan in South China when he was 14. Here workers worked 11-13 hours a day with frequent overnight working and were not given any protective equipment at all.  Luckily his uncle also worked in the kitchen at the factory and was able to get the child transferred to kitchen work. He worked from 8am till 8 or 9pm without any rest day at all.  The only time he was able to take time off was when auditors came and he was told by factory managers to hide himself away.  He would immediately start working again when auditors left the factory.  He recounted the culture of bullying at the factory, where supervisors routinely treated workers harshly, and said that he felt lucky to have escaped from this situation.

When Impactt discovered him, the team faced many difficulties in getting the factory to admit the problem and to sign up to a remediation programme, but, thanks to the determination of the brand we were working with, we were able to get the child back into education, where he is currently, clearly really enjoying his studies.

We’d like to see this kind of outcome in far more of the cases of child labour which we uncover.  Sadly, we find that we are successful in getting children to go back to school and stay back in school in only around 20% of cases.   Children often don’t want to go back to school, their families sometimes prefer them to carry on working, factory managers regularly deny the issue, and try to hide vital evidence and stymie remediation.  Brands often don’t know where to turn and precious time is lost, resulting in children trickling back to work elsewhere, out of reach of remediation efforts.  This is why we have developed the guidelines as an initial discussion document.  They are based on our experiences of working with children and supply chains in China, Bangladesh and Turkey.  We are keen to start a debate to develop consensus on the best way forward.  If you are interested in participating, contact rosey@impacttlimited.com or post a comment on this blog.

The report relates that because he is “an apprentice”, he is not paid. The conditions in which he works, and lives, are described as “smeared in filth” and “flowing with excrement”. Gap said they were unaware of the occurrence of outsourcing and the unit was not declared to them. However they have announced they are investigating the situation.

This illustrates a growing concern in the labour standards debate that the use of undeclared sub-contracting units is occurring under the radar of retailers. Gap is often viewed as a leading retailer on labour standards, and has done groundbreaking work on monitoring, remediation and purchasing practices. Their policy on child labour states: “If it is discovered children are being used by contractors, that contractor must remove the child from the workplace, provide it with access to schooling and a wage, and guarantee the opportunity of work on reaching a legal working age.” This is best practice when dealing with child labour.

The problem is that subcontracting is endemic in the Delhi garment industry. It is normal practice for registered factories to put out elements of production (embroidery, beading, embellishments and sometimes whole garments) to sub-contractors who run small domestic units, where conditions are always lower than in a registered factory and can sometimes be appalling. Other work goes out through a network of runners to individual homeworkers who are highly skilled at beading or embroidery.

One way of looking at this is to say that it pushes some of the income generated from global trade to desperately poor people who, being outside the formal economy, would normally not receive any of this money. Another way of looking at it is to say that it is a way of making more money by giving the work to people who are not protected by minimum wage or minimum age legislation and who have no job security. The challenge for Gap and others working in the field is to find a way to spread the income from global trade to poor people whilst also protecting their rights and improving their access to legal protection.

We hope that Gap will take up this challenge.

Watch this space to hear what the reaction is, first hand!

Our China team just sent over this terrible story from the Chinese papers. Be warned its not for the faint hearted…

Following the news stories on the Olympics firm accused of using child labor, the Chinese papers have reported that at least 1000 trafficked children were found working in brick-making factories in Shanxi. The youngest children were only 8 years old, the oldest only 13. The children were locked up after working all day until 10 at night. They did not have water for showers, many had skin diseases. Many were reported to have been severely beaten by the supervisors, some to the point where they had limbs broken, others had been beaten up with hot pods for churning bricks until their backs were burnt deeply.

About 400 parents have signed a petition letter on the internet desperate to seek help. The local media have reported that some parents rescued 40 children, but found that some local police deterred parents from rescuing other children, warning them ‘not to interfere with children of others’ while leaving the children working in the factories. Local police have been accused of being involved in trafficking the children among different brick factories in the region. Other local police were accused of putting money for financing the rescue action into their own pockets.

This sheds light on how deep corruption in the Shanxi area goes.

The allegations though extremely worrying, reflect the general situation in China. Campaigners should be congratulated on their dedication to uncovering the issues. Researchers worked in the factories alongside workers to discover what conditions were reallly like. In one factory they found 20 children, some as young as 12, working in their school holidays. In another factory they found forced overtime, fines and pay 65% less than the local minimum wage.

Play Fair 08 are calling on the International Olympic Committee to ensure labour standards are upheld. Poor standards clearly contradict Olympian values. After similar campaigns around the 2004 Athens Olympics the IOC should have been better prepared this time around.