Primark Increase Profits from Sweated Labour

I've never seen myself as a fashion photographer, but today I photographed a fashion show. But this was no ordinary fashion show, and the catwalk was on the pavement, outside Primark's flagship Oxford Street store.

Organised by War on Want and No Sweat, the models were in chains to symbolise the slave labour conditions of the Bangladeshi workers who make the cut-price fashions on sale at Primark. Workers who make the clothes earn as little as 7p an hour and work up to 80 hours a week.

Primark opened the Oxford St store two years ago, and are one of the few businesses to have flourished in the recession as people turn to cheaper suppliers - their profits in the year to last September were up by 17% at £233 million.

Primark have a notice in their window saying they care about the conditions of the workers who make their clothes, but the reports by War on Want tells a very different story. These clothes are only cheap because those who make them get poverty pay, work long hours and get sacked if they try to organise or ask for improvements in their dangerous and unhealthy working conditions.

No Sweat's Primark campaign is in solidarity with the Bangladeshi National Garment Workers Federation. You can find more facts on the No Sweat web site,  http://www.nosweat.org.uk
and the War on Want website
 http://www.waronwant.org/campaigns/supermarkets/fashion-victims
and you can now download their updated report,  http://tinyurl.com/d4zkl5 Fashion Victims II.

Two years since their first Fashion Victims report, despite the protestations of Primark that they ensure their clothes area produced fairly, this new report "shows workers making clothes for Primark, Tesco and Asda are still being exploited, despite promises from companies to improve the lives of their workers. In fact, given the damaging effects of the global food crisis, workers are now in an even worse position than they were before."

According to Paul Collins of War on Want "Gordon Brown's claim that the G20 summit deal will tackle global poverty ignores the reality that UK companies such as Primark are trapping people overseas in dire hardship. Unless he regulates British firms, growing numbers of the poor will pay a terrible price for the world economic crisis."

The fashion show attracted the attention of passers-by, who took leaflets about the shocking conditions that are behind the high profits in selling cheap clothes. It need not be so. Primark and others could still have a moral and reasonably profitable business if they restrained their greed and ensured that the workers who make their clothes worked in reasonable conditions and got a living wage - which in Bangladesh is only around £45 a month. But that is over three times what workers making clothes for Primark are currently paid.

More pictures on My London Diary shortly:
 http://mylondondiary.co.uk/2009/04/apr.htm#primark