What is a sweatshop?
Sweatshop labour is modern global capitalism stripped bare. It is large, rich, Western corporations exploiting slave wages, long hours and brutal work rates to
make super profits.

Why the Commonwealth Games?
Some of the biggest sportswear manufacturers are also some of the worst sweatshop exploiters. Companies like Nike, Adidas and Reebok have been
exposed sourcing in factories that pay poverty wages and exploit forced overtime and child labour.
Some of the Games' sponsors have a dreadful record of labour practices, engaging in union-busting, casualisation, private take-over of state utilities and more.

The corporate take-over of sport ties athletes to the sportswear giants, who then use their images to advertise clothes made for a pittance in sweatshops on
one side of the world for sale at huge prices in megastores on this side of the world.

The Games' own code of conduct doesn't contain any standards on workers' rights.

Who are the sweatshop exploiters?
Some of them are sponsors of the Games:

Microsoft - Windows 95 was packed and wrapped by prison labour at Twin Rivers Correctional Centre. They use "permatemps" for the bulk of their
workforce. Kept on temporary contracts for years, they are denied the pay and benefits given to the inner circle with real contracts. In December 2000 they
were forced to pay out $97m in lawsuits to permatemps. They now contract people for a short time, lay them off and hire them again to avoid paying them
properly. Microsoft's Bill Gates is America's richest man.

Cadbury - 90% of the World's cocoa, used to make chocolate, comes from the Ivory Coast, where Channel 4 exposed workers as young as 14 sold into
slavery for as little as $30. They are beaten and forced to work 18 hours a day. Although Cadbury buy most of their cocoa from Ghana, some of the chocolate
we eat is poisoned with the taste of slavery.

Asda - owned by Wal Mart, currently facing trial in the US for using "intimidation, threats, retaliation, coercion and surveillance" US union UFCW. The National
Labour Relations Board found them guilty of illegal union-busting of UFCW Local 880. They even have a management handbook for union-busting. Chi Fung
Factory Apopa was found forcing pregnancy tests and unpaid overtime, providing drinking water with 290 times the internationally allowed levels of bacteria,
using CCTV in the toilets and forbidding unions on threat of immediate firing if you join. In October 2000 52% of their clothes went to Wal Mart.

Adecco - the biggest employment agency in the World, operate privatised utilities like Australia’s telephone service and run a number of mines - the most
dangerous industry in the World, contributing to the 3,000 killed at work every day.
Casualisation and the shift to agency work have made many workers' jobs less secure. For some, like Simon Jones - decapitated on his first day working in
Portslade docks for a temp agency without proper training – it has meant injury or death.

Addleshaw Booth - solicitors specialising in union-busting. Legal 500 lists them on their website as number 1 in a list of non-union law firms.

Others produce the sportswear:
Reebok - supply kit to the GB teams. China Labour Watch, in January this year, found Reebok factories with low wages, overtime violations, high temperatures
and toxic fumes. They found an average 86 hours a month forced overtime. Dita Sari, Chair of the FNPBI trade unions in Indonesia, recently turned done
Reebok's Human Rights Award, pointing out that their profits were made by her members working in Indonesian sweatshops for poverty pay.

Nike - another big manufacturer, their workers at a factory in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam were found working 65 hours a week for $10. 77% of them had
breathing problems due to cancerous carcinogen levels 177 times the legal limit. In 1992 they paid Michael Jordan $20m to advertise Nike - more than they paid
their 30,000 workers in Indonesia.

Adidas - sponsor David Beckham to the tune of 1.4m pounds a year. Regularly caught sourcing in sweatshop factories. In one in Indonesia recently Nagadinah
Abu Marwadi was sacked and sent to jail for organising a strike.

The Commonwealth games is indeed a front for nasty corporate slavemasters.

'No Sweat' is, unfortunately, a front for useless left-wing politicians. This anti-sweatshop campaign aims to capitalise on the rising anti-corporate movement by turning people towards left-wing political parties -- in this case, 'Workers' Power.' (Lenin-Trotskyist)

I'd not argue with their motives AT ALL if their campaigning was at all good (I support Christian direct action groups, for example). But look:

The anti-sweatshop 'actions' advertised in the leading post seem to consist of...'leafletting and a stall' several days of the week. This is not action, but the death of activity.

The anti-sweatshop movement in the USA (as outlined in *No Logo*, for example) grew off the back of creative grassroots actions by many young activists. Since 2000 No Sweat aim to replicate this success in the UK -- without any difficult creative thinking or confrontations with the police.

Sure, I criticise. But what's my alternative?

Whether i have one or not should not affect your reading of my criticisms. I'll keep you all guessing.

Epsilon:

a. Workers' Power have left No Sweat;
b. So what;
c. The action is good (what, exactly, is the the matter with 'stalls' - i.e. places where leaflets are given out and petitions are signed);
d. You have, exactly WHAT alternative?;
e. I am a "Trot" and I've been earning next to no money for nearly 20 years, I live in next-to poverty because I want a better world;
f. Stop moaning you fuck.

oi ypsilon, you were talking a bit of shit (if not quite a lot of it)

do you judge the success or failure of campaigns on the amount of trouble they have with the police (or better said, trouble they cause with the police).....should not sweat go and smash up the windows of a nike shoeshop or a gap store or fire bomb them, if that's what you think you're a stupid fucker (or not a fucker, as you might not have as much pent-up sexual frustration that you need to end with direfirebombs).

and hwats wrong with handing out leaflets. surely people in campaigns want to actually LET PEOPLE KNOW what they are doing so they can understand the motives of that campaign. fighting with the pigs won't help that will it. no sweat is involved in serious work, not pissing about black bloc stylee. we are there helping to change things here and now, firebombing sweatshops in the east end (of london) wont change much. it woudl put their workers out of work, send them into worse poverty than now and possibly lead to their deportation in som e cases. we're building an active union in these sweatshops and helping those who work there change them from the inside, helping them do something positive themselves.

instead you'd prefer some small-town terrorism. whos a fuckwit eh? what's the better way (or the only way) to change the world. from below or with some cocktails? (i suspect youre words are just words, i bet you'd run scared of some real "action", you'd prefer a "pina colada" to a "molotov" wouldn't yer...)


anyone who wants to help us in some real practical political work, get in touch at mailto: admin@nosweat.org.uk

and see our website for some of the stuff we're up to, and how, and to debate it there (newswire, comments etc.)

Labour behind the Label and No Sweat are also organising an exhibition on sweatshop labour which will be on display at Friends Meeting House, Mount Street (behind the Central Reference library) during the Games. We also hope to organise a rally during the week of the Games.


We are also meeting on Thursdays at 7.30 on the third floor of Manchester Met University Students' Union, Oxford Road, Manchester to plan the campaign.

mailto: manchester@nosweat.org.uk