Sweatshop challenge - Spend well and change the world

Every day every one of us uses something produced in a factory where the working conditions and pay would be unacceptable if not illegal in our own workplaces.

Every day every one of us uses something, be it a smartphone, a pair of runners or a kettle, and the workers who made it, usually poorly educated women thousands of miles away in the Far East, get by far the very smallest share of what we pay for it.

It has always been thus but globalisation has accelerated and copper-fastened this process. It has also made uneasy bedfellows of consumerism and ethical questions because it is surely wrong to support manufacturers or retailers who do not treat workers properly. And it would be almost revolutionary to hope that all workers, no matter where their workbench is, enjoy the protections — comparatively at least — we regard as basic.

Undaunted by the prospect of being described a revolutionary, Pope Francis, at his morning Mass, described the working conditions of the factory workers who died in Bangladesh as “slave labour”.

Yesterday, Bangladeshi officials conceded that the death toll in the disaster outside Dhaka has passed 400. Another 149 people are missing but at this stage, more than a week after the disaster, it is hard to be optimistic about their prospects. Some 2,500 people were injured in the country’s worst industrial accident. At yesterday’s May Day parades in Dhaka, while the disaster victims were being buried in a mass grave, 20,000 people marched and demanded the building’s owners be hanged.

Some of the garments found in the wreckage were destined for Penneys and it is probable that many more clothes brands supported by us all source goods in Bangladesh, a country with one of the largest garment industries in the world. The sector makes up almost 80% of the country’s exports and employs around four million people.

Each of those four million people, and tens of millions more like them around the world, depend on those jobs no matter how exploitative or simply cruel they may seem to us. The alternative, probably a return to something below subsistence farming or urban destitution, is far too grim to contemplate and so boycotting these businesses is not an option.

This has been recognised by the European Union which has said it is considering “appropriate action” to encourage improvements in working conditions in Bangladeshi factories. This may include a trade preference system, which gives Bangladesh, and other countries who observe good employment practices, duty-free and quota-free access to EU markets. Another measure that might change poor employers into better employers would be the use of symbols on packaging and goods that would indicate that the goods are produced by workers who are allowed join a union and work in decent, audited conditions. This is no more than an extension of the Fair Trade scheme that has helped so many farmers in the developing world.

Today, as Chinese jobs move elsewhere because labour is becoming too expensive in that country, it is more important than ever to recognise the link between our retail choices and the lives led by vulnerable workers in societies very different to our own. As ever, using the euro in your pocket in a certain way is the loudest and strongest statement you can make.