Words Dept.: entry

It will be depressing if the imminent destruction of the world is allowed to come about while Mondeo man worries about the cost of diesel, as the Guardian suggested yesterday. But at least another vaguely ethical issue seems to be rising up the media agenda like rubbish school dinners and free-range eggs.

I’m talking about the often crappy conditions in which clothes are made in Asia for sale on the British high street. Sweatshops, in other words. For some time now I have held the silent conviction that anyone who shops in Gap or Primark should be garrotted. OK, well maybe not garrotted, but perhaps forced to work a 48-hour week sewing clothes for 13p an hour.

According to the Guardian last year,

A nine-month pregnant woman from Shalina Creations, a factory supplying Gap, went into labour at work and subsequently lost her baby.

Rathnamma, 27, a mother of two, claimed that she was refused immediate leave on March 29 this year, after going into labour. When she asked to go home, the production manager made her fill in forms that took an hour and a half, she said. “I was in such pain, I could hardly stand up.”

When she finally made it outside the factory gates, she collapsed, she said, and gave birth to the baby in the street. A passerby helped her into an auto rickshaw, but when she got home, she discovered the baby was dead. Rathnamma, who has returned to work after being given paid leave for three months, said: “I feel angry. They gave me money, but nothing will bring the baby back. But I need the job. If I have no job, I have no food.”

Gap representatives in the US did not dispute her allegations. However, a Gap representative in India denied that she was refused immediate leave, said that she gave birth in a rickshaw, and not on the street, and claimed the baby died when it slipped from her grasp.

There’s one to frighten the children, not to mention the PR people.

Someone In Television apparently shared my concerns, hence the recent Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts on BBC Three, and the forthcoming The Devil Wears Primark on Channel 4, which struck me as an uncharacteristically fine title for a Channel 4 programme until I Googled it and saw the 5,000 websites that have already used it.

There’s a tendency to turn the topic into a shallow piece of “factual entertainment” and, being an often dull and rather overtly serious person at times, I would naturally prefer a proper documentary (and not one of the amusing Jon Ronson/Louis Theroux-type, either). Still, better to engage with morons than have them turn over to Big Brother, I suppose. So let’s see what happens.