Modern Slavery Part IV
Posted on September 3, 2007
Filed Under Business, Politics, News | Leave a Comment
When you go and buy some new clothes and you are happy that you have managed to nab yourself a bargain, how much is that feeling of getting something for almost nothing worth to you?
Is it worth knowing that you have participated in killing children, just so that you can look good on a budget? Is it worth the fact that you are keeping other people in poverty and slavery just so that your money gets you what you want?
Are you that shallow, that superficial?
The Guardian:
Two of Britain’s major high street retailers launched inquiries last night into allegations that factory workers who make their clothes in India are being paid as little as 13p per hour for a 48-hour week, wages so low the workers claim they sometimes have to rely on government food parcels.
Primark, the UK’s second biggest clothing retailer, and the Mothercare, the mother and baby shop, were responding to a Guardian investigation into the pay and conditions of workers in Bangalore, India, who supply several high-profile UK and US fashion brands.
The investigation, which follows our report in July in which Primark, Asda and Tesco were accused of breaching international labour standards in Bangladesh, has uncovered a catalogue of allegations of Dickensian pay and conditions in factories owned by exporters who supply clothes to the UK. India’s largest ready-made clothing exporter, Gokaldas Export, which supplies brands including Marks & Spencer, Mothercare and H&M, confirmed that wages paid to garment workers were as low as £1.13 for a nine-hour day. This fails to meet their basic needs, according to factory workers and Indian unions and so falls below the minimum international labour standards promised by the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a code of conduct which sets out basic rights for employees across the supply chain. Marks & Spencer is a member of the ETI, as are Mothercare, Gap and Primark.
Garment workers for factories owned by exporters who supply to Gap, Matalan and Primark, told the Guardian they were paid similar wages and regularly forced to work overtime of between six and 18 hours per week. The ETI code states that workers shall not regularly be required to work more than 48 hours per week, that overtime should be voluntary and that it should not exceed 12 hours per week.
If you imagine that when something like this hits the headlines, the retailers are forced to take action and mend their ways, forget it.
They will do nothing to jeopardise their profits and everything to ensure the status quo. Sometimes the only one who will take action is the individual.
You.
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Brazil, Britain, Anywhere, Everywhere
Posted on August 31, 2007
Filed Under Business, Politics | Leave a Comment
Hurrah! Capitalism has taken over the entire world. There is no other show on earth. You are the winner!
Many years ago when visiting Australia (where they have massive roadside signs proclaiming “Next McDonald’s 1250 km”) a friend said that the best thing about McDonald’s was that wherever in the world you ate one, it was exactly the same. Thousands of people in all corners of the planet could be having exactly the same taste experience at exactly the same time.
The problem with this global monoculture is that we are now persuaded to believe that sameness is good, whereas it has been diversity which has propelled human development.
To have a global market, you need global brands and you need a world which thinks the same about everything. To be different, to have a mind of your own, to be a particular individual is actually anti-capitalist.
It is less the police state which will guarantee conformity and more the global one trick pony of capitalism, which may well ensure its dominance through the police state, but it will do so equally happily through your democratically elected government.
The Guardian on Brazil:
At Daslu, a mega-luxury designer store in Sao Paulo billed as Latin America’s most glamorous ’shopping experience,’ customers arrive by helicopter and are ferried in golf carts across marble floors to spare their Jimmy Choo heels. Slim, tanned dasluzetes attend to the sartorial needs of senators’ daughters while uniformed maids, bussed in from the favelas, hover with cafezinhos (espressos) and scoop up discarded garments.
Daslu’s decadence is unnerving. Like the cocaine problem. It’s when you happen to sit on a bus next to a boy with a bag of cocaine whose armed bodyguard, an off-duty policewoman, sits two rows behind, that you begin to see how dangerous Brazil really is. Or when the police arrive in response to a burglary at your home and suggest you buy a bullet from them, which you can fire and they’ll take full responsibility for, the next time you’re in trouble. A bargain at 1,000 reals (£250).
The problem with law and order, or rather the lack of it, is most apparent at night, when packs of feral children roam the streets and drivers know better than to stop at red lights. The problem is poverty as a daily reality, a flood of guns, alienated youth.
What is unfortunate is to be invited to celebrate these inequities, again, the great paradox of Brazil, a soap opera of impunity and greed. God forbid the social hierarchy should ever change. Upward mobility? On taking office in 2002, President Luiz Inacio da Silva was quoted as saying he was ‘fighting to bring the poor of Brazil out of economic apartheid’. The social groups who voted him in demanded a fairer and more egalitarian Brazil. But Lula doesn’t want to jeopardise economic growth. His plans for development are [in] line with the needs of big business.
The problem with this superficial, artificial culture is when you think of its exemplars, its paradigms, perhaps in terms of the immaculately dressed and coiffed wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of the plutocracy.
They look appealing in a disturbingly packaged and processed kind of way, like supermarket food which is enticing on the box, disappointing in reality and, like the McDonald’s utterly Unhappy Meal you waited 1250 km to eat, tastes of anything, of nothing.
When there is something other than nothing going on in the minds of these people, it is only ever one thing: money.
So, is that really what you want to be like? Is it?
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Modern Slavery Part III
Posted on August 26, 2007
Filed Under Business, Welcome To Great Britain, News | Leave a Comment
We are so impregnated with the idea that the only function of people is to provide us with labour or entertainment and our only consideration for ourselves should be making money and succeeding commercially, that the result in human trafficking and sex slavery is not surprising.
Our lives are lived in the arena of imagined gladiatorial combat, where we misinterpret slogans such as “survival of the fittest” and “it’s dog eat dog” until we actually sink to an intellectual level lower than animals and a brutality which shames humanity.
Although gangs may be involved and the enterprise may be organised on a large scale, this is actually micro-economics operating without restraint. This is how individuals pursuing unbridled moneymaking sink to a level where other humans are commodities whose only function is to be exploited.
The Guardian:
A major police operation to crack down on the trafficking of women has discovered that some victims are being ’sold’ at auctions in pubs before they are forced to work in brothels.
In the largest operation of its kind, police in Cambridgeshire have raided 73 suspected brothels in the past few months. They have already rescued seven women, some with serious injuries sustained as they tried to escape.
The scale of the abuse has horrified the officers and other agencies working with them, who have found women being forced to work in the sex trade in houses in villages as well as city centres, being unable to go out and having sex with up to 60 men a day, earning thousands of pounds for the gangs.
Detective Chief Inspector Paul Fullwood, leading the investigation, said: ‘We have seen organised crime moving away from firearms and drugs into sex trafficking. It’s a lucrative area for these gangs, and the women they get hold of can find it very, very hard to escape.’
Police say that in the auctions a woman is brought into the pub with a minder. She is seen by members of different gangs who are then invited to bid for her. The amount they pay in some cases is as little as £1,000.
So far, 24 people have been arrested during Operation Radium, most on suspicion of immigration offences, and all have been bailed. No charges have yet been brought as a result of the operation, which is still gathering intelligence.
Many of the women who are trafficked into Britain each year come from eastern Europe, Africa and the Far East, tempted by the prospect of a better life and well-paid jobs. But on arrival their identity documents are taken, and they are often kept captive in appalling conditions.
So far, seven women have been rescued. Others have fled, fearing arrest even though they are innocent.
Fullwood, head of Cambridgeshire’s serious and organised crime unit, said: ‘Many brothels operate under the guise of other businesses. They may be just ordinary-looking homes in quiet neighbourhoods.’ He has appealed for men who have used brothels to report places where they think women are prisoners.
[…]
Tory MP Shailesh Vara, joint vice-chair of the Commons all-party group on trafficking women and children, said: ‘It is fantastic that the police have mounted such an operation to try to uncover what’s happening. What they have found so far is really alarming. It’s becoming clear now that many women are kidnapped and held against their will in houses right across Britain, and yet are almost invisible to the rest of us.
Vara, MP for North West Cambridgeshire, added: ‘The idea that some women are auctioned off in pubs like animals is disgusting. Far more must be done to stop this trade. Britain must ratify the United Nations convention on human trafficking, so international measures can be taken to stop these gangs.’
Derbyshire Police:
Property raided in human trafficking investigation
One woman has been rescued and another arrested at a house being used as a suspected brothel in part of Derby this morning.
Officers raided the semi-detached house in Coronation Street at 10am as part of ongoing work by Derbyshire Constabulary to target people trafficking.
It is the third such raid that has taken place in the county in the last few months.
The woman arrested is suspected to run the property while the second woman is being treated as a victim of human trafficking.
A female detective used an iPod with a message in 12 different languages to explain to the victim why the police were there and the fact they were there to help and support her.
Both women are of Chinese origin.
Detective Inspector Steve Pont, of Pear Tree CID, said: “We have gathered intelligence to suggest that the property in question was being run as a brothel.
“In many cases the girls who work there have been brought into the country under false pretences and then find themselves forced into prostitution.
“This type of premises also has a negative impact on the local community in terms of associated criminal activity and anti-social behaviour.
“We want to target and disrupt such activity before it gets to be a problem in Derby and Derbyshire.”
Anyone with information on crime in the area can contact police at Pear Tree police station on 0845 123 33 33 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Britain, like America, has become the one trick pony of capitalism, in which the buying and selling of one person by another is always acceptable as long as money is made in the transaction.
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