Words Dept.: entry

It’s now more than seven months since Channel 4 pulled The Devil Wears Primark, an Alexa Chung-fronted documentary (no, really) which was supposed to have examined Primark’s use of sweat shops. The C4 website says:

The advertised transmission of The Devil Wears Primark on Sunday 1 June 2008 was postponed. We plan to show the programme at a later date.

Showing it now might be a quite timely. I was thinking about it after the story broke this weekend that Primark is using a factory in Manchester that pays illegal immigrants £3 an hour to make clothes.

In case you haven’t figured it out, I detest Primark, and the wider issue of sweatshops also gets me agitated. It doesn’t take a lot of brain power to figure out that a ten quid jumper with several hundred sequins sewn on to it is going to be made by someone who is being paid virtually nothing. Yet otherwise intelligent people actively boast about shopping there as though it’s something to be admired. Really, you might as well boast about voting Conservative as far as I’m concerned. (Like Lucy Pinder, in fact. Yuck. Gone off her.)

And it’s unsurprising that Primark’s horrible brown paper carrier bags are the size of bin liners. The clothes are so cheap that the dismal concept of buying a great big pile of stuff, wearing it once and throwing it away is virtually a part of the brand identity.

Rather than face up to the longstanding problem of slave labour in its supply chain, Primark actually has signs in its stores bigging up its ethical credentials. It has now been forced to withdraw these references to the Ethical Trading Initiative, pending an investigation.

All of which is good. The problem is that although the News of the World broke this story, how many of its three million readers actually care? Until the wearing of sweatshop-produced clothing becomes socially unacceptable (like drink driving, or voting Conservative), not a lot is going to change.