BBC Panorama programme exposes LIDL "worked to death" factories

qapmoc

There was a great programme between 8.30 and 9pm tonight on BBC1. Undercover reporters done a great investigation. It visited factories in third world countries where people are worked to death , doing up to 19 hour shifts and locked in while doing the shifts, in cramped conditions ( like under tables), making clothes for lidl. Think of them when you are walking down the centre isles looking for a "bargain". Its is a long way from the sweatshops where the stuff is made. Working from 7 in the morning until 1 or 2 at night. And I'm sure worse goes on that what they found.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24195441

osarusan

Pretty misleading title isn't it?

This clothes factory makes garments for many different retailers. It's hardly a LIDL factory.

That said, the conditions sound appalling, but customers like myself are partly to blame. If I buy a 3 euro tshirt at Penney's, how much can I imagine the person who made it actually got paid? Or how much can I pretend that I never imagined that the person who made it worked in such conditions.

qapmoc

osarusan wrote: »

It's hardly a LIDL factory.

The factory was working on a contract to supply Lidl with one and a half million pairs of jeans. The programme visited other factories too, and the name "Lidl" come up more than once. It never mentioned Pennies or Primark.
Schnell. Ve have ways of making you vork.

Cookie_Monster

doesn't really sound like Lidl's fault, or that they are even aware of it. In fact the linked article clearly suggests the factory owners are going out of their way to cover it up.

They even provided timesheets for the night I watched the factory. They say the shift ended at 17:30.

The paperwork looks convincing. If I hadn't seen it myself, I would never know that workers were being forced to work such long days.

Kalpona Akter, from the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity, says many factories hide the truth about working hours from Western retailers.

If the factory is falsifying records what exactly do you expect Lidl to do, short of having a full staff of PI's in these countries? It's hardly beneficial for anyone if Lidl (or any other brand) pull out of Bangladesh altogether and take jobs from those factories operating reasonable standards as well as those that are not.

Blame lies squarely with the greedy factory owners and the Bangladeshi gov and courts for not stopping this type of thing IMO.

Guy:Incognito

Just buy from pennys instead, nothing ever happens to the well run factories for their well paid staff in, say , india.............

Hootanany

Are top brands not made there as well?

kneemos

Panorama is almost comical in the way picks on companies and sensationalises to try and confirm their almost liableous accusations.

Sunglasses Ron

Germans running harsh work camps to feed the need for the fatherland to acquire cheap goods?

You're ****tin me.......

Corruptedmorals

Guy:Incognito wrote: »

Just buy from pennys instead, nothing ever happens to the well run factories for their well paid staff in, say , india.............

Yeah that 8 storey factory where Penneys had their clothes made...on one floor. They've made no bones about trying to help the situation, the survivors and their families. Deafening silence from the retailers using the other 7 floors.

Apart from American Apparel and wooly Irish jumper shops etc, basically everything is made in these countries. It's unfair to have a scapegoat. I know for a fact River Island use the exact same suppliers as Penneys, Dorothy Perkins the same as Dunnes Stores...which would implicate the group Dorothy P is a part of- Topshop, Burton etc.

jimgoose

Grrrrr!! I HATE this crap! What the hemorrhaging furk are we doing, working people to death in this day-and-age so we can have "bargains"?? :mad:

Mr Benevolent

jimgoose wrote: »

Grrrrr!! I HATE this crap! What the hemorrhaging furk are we doing, working people to death in this day-and-age so we can have "bargains"?? :mad:

Because we like cheap stuff?

Guy:Incognito

Corruptedmorals wrote: »

Yeah that 8 storey factory where Penneys had their clothes made...on one floor. They've made no bones about trying to help the situation, the survivors and their families. Deafening silence from the retailers using the other 7 fkoors.

Im sure the dead people are all chuffed that steps are being taken afterwards.

jimgoose

Mr Benevolent wrote: »

Because we like cheap stuff?

I don't. Not at that price.

Guy:Incognito

jimgoose wrote: »

Grrrrr!! I HATE this crap! What the hemorrhaging furk are we doing, working people to death in this day-and-age so we can have "bargains"?? :mad:

We could make all the clothes here, pay fair wages and higher prices. The people in 3rd world countries would still be poor ( or even worse off seeing as theyd have no wage at all)


Your allowed not buy stuff from there. Ive no issues with where my goods come from.

hfallada

Lidl pay their staff €11,85 an hour here and give them private health insurance, pensions and paid holiday. Meaning its not all about greed for lidl.

They have no control of what their suppliers in the third world produce. But when you go to lidl a large amount of their specials eg hedge cutters etc are made in Germany.

I hate the way people always associate cheap something with ****ty rights for the workers. Most american branded designer clothes are made in sweatshops but no one cares anymore. It's up to the government to protect its people from shady business owners and no Europeans thousands of miles away

Mr Benevolent

jimgoose wrote: »

I don't. Not at that price.

Where are you going to get new socks and underwear from now? You'd better knit them yourself if your don't want virtual slave labour making them. Perhaps you could commission a few pairs from Louis Copeland? I'm told Saville Row do a nice line in Y-fronts.

jimgoose

Guy:Incognito wrote: »

We could make all the clothes here, pay fair wages and higher prices. The people in 3rd world countries would still be poor ( or even worse off seeing as theyd have no wage at all)


Your allowed not buy stuff from there. Ive no issues with where my goods come from.

Or we could make the clothes in the Third World, pay fair wages for sensible working hours and decent working conditions, use buildings that are unlikely to collapse, and pay slightly higher prices.

jimgoose

Mr Benevolent wrote: »

Where are you going to get new socks and underwear from now? You'd better knit them yourself if your don't want virtual slave labour making them. Perhaps you could commission a few pairs from Louis Copeland? I'm told Saville Row do a nice line in Y-fronts.

One word - Commando. :cool:

Corruptedmorals

Guy:Incognito wrote: »

Im sure the dead people are all chuffed that steps are being taken afterwards.

Better than completely ignoring it, no?

Frank Lee Midere

Mr Benevolent wrote: »

Because we like cheap stuff?

This stuff could be as cheaply made by machines in the west. And it's not just the cheap stuff. It's all the stuff. Blame the profit makers not the consumers.

If panorama were to really oppose this the only solution is trade restriction.

kneemos

jimgoose wrote: »

Or we could make the clothes in the Third World, pay fair wages for sensible working hours and decent working conditions, use buildings that are unlikely to collapse, and pay slightly higher prices.

We could if there wasn't corrupt governments and companies willing to take advantage.

bumper234

Op mentions Lidl in the title but fails to mention these same factories were making products for Baby Gap and edinburgh woolen mills.

Frank Lee Midere

Mr Benevolent wrote: »

Where are you going to get new socks and underwear from now? You'd better knit them yourself if your don't want virtual slave labour making them. Perhaps you could commission a few pairs from Louis Copeland? I'm told Saville Row do a nice line in Y-fronts.

This is a fallacy. The west could do this with more mechanisation. Or lower margins or both. Prices won't have to increase.

Dravokivich

Guy:Incognito wrote: »

Im sure the dead people are all chuffed that steps are being taken afterwards.

Without dead people, standards don't improve.

Cee-Jay-Cee

qapmoc wrote: »

The factory was working on a contract to supply Lidl with one and a half million pairs of jeans

You mean there are actually 1.5 million people walking around in Lidl jeans, I didn't think anyone was cheap enough to buy them but obviously not.

jimgoose wrote: »

Or we could make the clothes in the Third World, pay fair wages for sensible working hours and decent working conditions, use buildings that are unlikely to collapse, and pay slightly higher prices.

Tell us all how you propose to
Implement that great idea? Would we write to the governments of those countries and ask that first of all they ensure factories are built to a specific safety level, that employees have to clock in and out each day and that we want random clock-in cards sent over to us here in Ireland to be checked regularly and that we here in Ireland want to set the basic/minimum pay rate for their country or have you another way of ensuring it happens? In theory it sounds great and it's the way it should be, in reality, it's never going to happen, ever.

seamus

qapmoc wrote: »

The factory was working on a contract to supply Lidl with one and a half million pairs of jeans. The programme visited other factories too, and the name "Lidl" come up more than once. It never mentioned Pennies or Primark.

That's what Panorama do. They pick on the highest-profile brands and focus on their actions, because that's what gets the viewers in.

If they mentioned the names of all the other retailers who use these factories, that would weaken their, "LIDL are slave traders" sensationalist headlines, so they deliberately select the information they release in order to make their case appear better.

Panorama and Watchdog used to be great programmes, they used to be fair, even-handed and would give all sides a chance to tell their story.

But in the interests of ratings they've sacrificed all that and they will only portray the story that they think will be popular, not the one that tells the whole truth.

They're a couple of steps above the Sun and the Daily Mail, but only because they actually engage in some investigative journalism. The quality of their reporting is horrifically biased and should be viewed in the context that they're trying to shock you as best they can, they're not trying to tell you the truth.

bumper234

CJC999 wrote: »

You mean there are actually 1.5 million people walking around in Lidl jeans, I didn't think anyone was cheap enough to buy them but obviously not.

They were childrens jeans that were being made made and you have to remember Lidl have upwards of 5000 stores all over Europe

jimgoose

CJC999 wrote: »

...In theory it sounds great and it's the way it should be, in reality, it's never going to happen, ever.

I'd imagine the likes of Kier Hardie and Jim Larkin used to hear something similar quite a lot. I am far indeed from a raging leftie, but it occurs to me that a small bit of fair-fúcks shouldn't be out of the question in the 21st century? But the pragmatic, hard-headed businessmen obviously know more than me, and so the race to the bottom proceeds apace.

fishy fishy

qapmoc wrote: »

The factory was working on a contract to supply Lidl with one and a half million pairs of jeans. The programme visited other factories too, and the name "Lidl" come up more than once. It never mentioned Pennies or Primark.
Schnell. Ve have ways of making you vork.

can you point out where it says they were working on 1.5 million pairs of jeans for lidl.

Frank Black

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the West needs to stop purchasing stuff from the Developing World. The only way we'll conquer poverty there is by returning people to subsistence farming methods.

Savoir.Faire

Frank Black wrote: »

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the West needs to stop purchasing stuff from the Developing World. The only way we'll conquer poverty there is by returning people to subsistence farming methods.

Absolutely. Until they cast off the shackles of the imperialist whitey who oppresses them and start a glorious socialist revolution of the people.

Guy:Incognito

Corruptedmorals wrote: »

Better than completely ignoring it, no?

It was hardly the first time the issue of workers conditions have come up in the third world. If people/companies dont care thats fine. Just dont pretend to care once something makes the news.

bodice ripper

qapmoc wrote: »

Schnell. Ve have ways of making you vork.

Godwined your own thread in three posts. A record surely?

SpaceTime

I think part of the problem is that the whole thing is so divorced from the consumer that it's not surprising that people don't really think about it.

A lot of people probably have some image in their head of the clothes being churned out by some big clothes making robot at Lidl HQ rather than being put together by very low paid workers in fairly primitive conditions in a developing country.

I think people really need to start looking at what they buy. The textile industry has a horrible history of abusing workers. When conditions eventually improved in the 20th century in Europe and North America, it seems at the first opportunity the textile industry left and went back to its 19th century approach somewhere else.

The whole supply chain is also so broken up into different bits run by different companies that nobody knows what's going on anymore. It's all subcontractors supplying companies who supply other companies who ultimately supply some retail outlet.

The electronics industry's even worse because there are so many parts to breakdown the process into. Your smartphone might be made in reasonably OK conditions in say China but you could find that many of the other components are made in less than ideal conditions and supplied up the chain.

It's at the level that you could probably not guarantee the exact provenience of almost any piece of electronic or electrical equipment.
The more high tech and complex it gets, the more likely that the high end brand is just plugging components together.

We really need to start treating consumer products and clothes more like the way we treat food. We tend to demand traceability and accountability in the food industry (at least more than other industries) and I think we should start doing the same for clothes and consumer goods.

I mean, I actually go out of my way to buy clothes made from ethically sourced organic cotton. I'm not that pushed by labels but I'm sick of paying huge prices for what is essentially a sweatshop product. You can get good clothes, at relatively reasonable prices and avoid products like this if you look around a bit harder.

I think perhaps we should be looking beyond Lidl in this too. They're not primarily a clothing retailer.
There are plenty of very expensive products being made the same way and in those cases the consumer's also being charged an enormous mark up and the product is still coming from those conditions.

The other issue is that as long as western consumers are demanding and getting products are unrealistically cheap prices, it will just continue to create abuse like this and continue to drive more and more jobs out of Europe and North America to wherever's cheapest. I mean, China's even going to start losing jobs as it develops and these guys go off to the next sweatshop destination.

bumper234

Look at it this way.

Everything you use, eat, travel in is made by the company who said they could do it cheapest. The airbus A380 has about 4 MILLION parts it can hold 850 passengers and every part made (not in sweatshops) by the company who put in the lowest tender, meaning the company that can either pay the lowest wage or can source it out to a company that does.

SpaceTime

Yeah but there's cheap due to efficiency vs cheap due to abuse of people.

The textile industry is mostly low tech and very manual in terms of what it does. So you end up with sweatshops.
The lower end of the electronics industry can be similar.

The thing is that in both industries with some ingenuity, the processes would be done by computer aided manufacture and automated processes.
When people are cheap they get abused.

The only reason that those conditions disappeared in the developed world was because of trade unions and legislation to protect workers rights.
It was a long struggle to get to the point we are at today.

The problem now is that there are no minimum standards as the whole thing is globalized.

keithclancy

Panorama is complete crap these days.

KyussBishop

Many of the same posters defending/acting-as-apologist for this crap, also seem to advocate the view that these are the third-world countries we should lower our own domestic wages to 'compete' with, and also support the destruction of unions and such that can prevent this type of abuse; hence supporting a general race-to-the-bottom in worker standards around the world (since there's no other way to compete monetarily, with the competitiveness this level of worker abuse provides - perhaps we shouldn't compete against such low standards? especially when you need other countries increasing imports, for anyone else to increase exports, which nobody is doing right now).

A lot of these posters give less of a shít about these abused workers, and far more about deferring responsibility away from the companies funding that, and the consumers also supporting/funding that; deferring responsibility so far away, that they can pretend it's an unsolvable problem we and the companies have no control over, when that's nonsense.


It's the companies responsibility to make sure their suppliers treat their workers humanely (any argument against this is simply a deferral of responsibility - it's not an impractical or unreasonable demand, it's not even expensive), and consumers have an ethical responsibility, when they become aware of a company directly or indirectly supporting abuse of workers, to properly take that into consideration and decide whether they want to do business with that company anymore.

Some people may be so strapped they have no choice though, some companies may have a completely opaque supply line or a monopoly position in the markets, so I'm not saying this is free from complicated practical issues; none of them are unresolvable though, and there is no valid reason not to work towards resolving them, with proper inspections for starters.

Breaching this ethical responsibility on the consumers part, has very little cost in terms of judgment or repercussions though (you could argue, it's the same with companies); hence nobody cares, unless the abuses are happening to workers closer to home (nobody gives a toss about people 8000+km away though, right?).

gobnaitolunacy

CJC999 wrote: »

In theory it sounds great and it's the way it should be, in reality, it's never going to happen, ever.

It happened in the western world e v e n t u a l l y , but not before countless people got tangled up in looms, disasterous factory fires etc, one of the worst is barely remembered now http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

D1stant

Frank Black wrote: »

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the West needs to stop purchasing stuff from the Developing World. The only way we'll conquer poverty there is by returning people to subsistence farming methods.

Too true. Give them back the bows and arrows. Shut down all the software companies in India and China. Keep them in their place

MadYaker

Frank Black wrote: »

I've said it before and I'll say it again, the West needs to stop purchasing stuff from the Developing World. The only way we'll conquer poverty there is by returning people to subsistence farming methods.

I guess you have no problem paying €10 for a pair of socks then?

Subsistence farming for everyone? Right...

Capt'n Midnight

One way you can get cheap goods is pay the workers as little as possible. Globalisation means that the sweatshops are no longer local.


What galls me is when the likes of Apple or the fashion labels charge way over the odds and still use places like this. Seriously are Apple even saving half a percent by using factories that have anti-suicide nets installed ?

A lot of fashion labels are made in similar factories to the really cheap stuff and their workers don't really get anything from the markup the "brand" gets.


Thing is people are OK with this. This sort of story pops up every few years. Read this about the Nike brand and the various costs involved
http://www.uow.edu.au/~sharonb/nike.html

'In one year, Nike paid Michael Jordan [pictured above] as much (about $25m) to pitch the shoes as its subcontractors paid 35,000 Vietnamese to make them.

SpaceTime

The issue is also that these companies are driven by their share price and if their cost of manufacturing is out of line with their competitors, various 'analysts' (vultures) will just start crowing about how the company's under-performing and their share price suddenly plummets.

We need some more seriously loud ethical investment funds and fund managers to drive it.

EDDIE WATERS

Quick someone get Bono and Bob Geldolf to write a song

qapmoc

hfallada wrote: »

They (LIDL) have no control of what their suppliers in the third world produce.

"No control" ? They could and should have, especially a company of that size. Other western companies have quality control managers on the ground in the countries where the goods are made. If Lidl beat the price of its one and a half million pairs of jeans to a dollar a pair or whatever and the workers have to work locked up for 19 hours a day making them, thats not right.

hfallada wrote: »

But when you go to lidl a large amount of their specials eg hedge cutters etc are made in Germany.

No they are not: the hedge cutters are made in China, but with western branding / writing on the box. Most of the goods in those centre isles is made in countries which can produce poor quality low-tech goods the cheapest.

fishy fishy wrote: »

can you point out where it says they were working on 1.5 million pairs of jeans for lidl.

The documentary was half an hour long. Did you not see it? The investigators got in to the factory and showed the cramped conditions, they inspected timesheets, they asked questions to the management and workers there, they "staked out" the factory around the clock to see what times the workers came and went at, they observed them being locked in there by security guards etc.

FTA69

KyussBishop wrote: »

Some people may be so strapped they have no choice though, some companies may have a completely opaque supply line or a monopoly position in the markets, so I'm not saying this is free from complicated practical issues; none of them are unresolvable though, and there is no valid reason not to work towards resolving them, with proper inspections for starters.

Breaching this ethical responsibility on the consumers part, has very little cost in terms of judgment or repercussions though (you could argue, it's the same with companies); hence nobody cares, unless the abuses are happening to workers closer to home (nobody gives a toss about people 8000+km away though, right?).

Absolutely. I wouldn't underestimate the level of difficulty that poor people in our own society might face in sourcing ethical goods either however. There are an increasing number of people attending food banks, I doubt they'd be able to enquire as to whether they're Fair Trade or responsibly produced. Similarly you could hardly blame any cash-strapped family for shopping in Primark for clothing needs. The race to the bottom is also taking place in our own societies and is pushing people further into poverty, which in turn means they will only be able to purchase cheap goods based on exploitation. What doesn't go down of course, is profits and the wealth gap between those who produce and those who employ.

Realistically the only way things are going to improve in countries such as Bangladesh etc is for workers in those countries to organise as a collective. In a global world, trade unions should also have a global and international focus. One thing to come out of the Bangladesh collapse was my own union forging links with unions there and hopefully any financial or organisational contribution we can make will help those over there fighting for garment workers.

In the meantime, how our food/clothes etc are produced should always be a topic of discussion and we should always be demanding that the things we receive are produced in a responsible manner. What we shouldn't be doing is saying everything's grand and placing absolutely no onus on corporations to demand their best from their suppliers. Pretending they have no influence over their subbies is nonsense, and a pretty sh*t attitude to have toward human beings who are working in abysmal conditions.

SpaceTime

Neither Europe nor America operate completely unmoderated free-market capitalism. It's moderated by quite tough labour laws, environmental protection laws, product safety laws, competition laws, taxation laws etc etc and a social welfare safety net of some sort.

No successful western-type economy operates as an unfettered capitalism system, despite what American right-leaning politicians would have you believe about the US, it's actually quite socialist in many respects.

From what I can see, a large chunk of what globalisation has done is allow companies to evade those rules and exploit the hell out of developing nations in terms of human exploitation and also environmental degradation that wouldn't be tolerated in the west and it's cost developed countries in terms of well paying blue collar jobs that would otherwise have to be done at a reasonable pay rate.

We (the EU and US who are the world's two largest markets by a vast distance) need to insist on the same minimum standards of human rights and environmental protection for imported goods that we make our own companies comply with here.
Otherwise, we're just pushing environmental and human rights abuses overseas.

It just seems to get more and more extreme the more these companies are just allowed to profit seek without any kind of moderation whatsoever. It's like we're on our way back to Victorian times having had a golden age of balanced free-market mixed capitalism / socialism in the "west" through the 20th century.

We get cheap goods, but at the cost of jobs and at a huge human rights and environmental cost elsewhere in the world where they're being produced.

Competition is good, but this isn't fair competition it's just a total degradation of basic standards.
I mean, why should a company doing things right be undermined by a company that's basically exploiting quasi-slave labour or pumping pollutants into the environment instead of using more expensive clean processes ?

It seems grossly unfair that there's this back door into a world without rules where $ is everything and there are no pesky laws to impede your business.

fishy fishy

qapmoc wrote: »

"No control" ? They could and should have, especially a company of that size. Other western companies have quality control managers on the ground in the countries where the goods are made. If Lidl beat the price of its one and a half million pairs of jeans to a dollar a pair or whatever and the workers have to work locked up for 19 hours a day making them, thats not right.



No they are not: the hedge cutters are made in China, but with western branding / writing on the box. Most of the goods in those centre isles is made in countries which can produce poor quality low-tech goods the cheapest.



The documentary was half an hour long. Did you not see it? The investigators got in to the factory and showed the cramped conditions, they inspected timesheets, they asked questions to the management and workers there, they "staked out" the factory around the clock to see what times the workers came and went at, they observed them being locked in there by security guards etc.

no, but the link on your first post said they were manufacturing 150,000 pairs of jeans - not 1.5 million. Bit of a sums error there. Was that your mistake or the documentary's mistake.

Also, this is not exclusive to Lidl - most clothes shops have warehouses/factories in poorer countries.

SpaceTime

This won't be solved by just whining at or about individual retailers or companies though.
They're in a situation where they have to produce the goods at X price or someone else will produce them at X-1 and they lose market share.

That's why markets need some degree of regulation or they can end up producing really nasty social, environmental and economic consequences.

The market conditions that the companies currently operate in will just kill off any company that tries to produce ethically other than niche operators and maybe aspects of the food industry where consumers get very switched-on about quality.

I'm not anti-free trade or anti-globalisation btw. I am however completely against this whole idea that you can have a completely unregulated market and just throw all the 20th century's social progress down the toilet so you can get a pair of jeans for €2 or whatever.

Bog Standard User

qapmoc wrote: »

The factory was working on a contract to supply Lidl with one and a half million pairs of jeans. The programme visited other factories too, and the name "Lidl" come up more than once. It never mentioned Pennies or Primark.
Schnell. Ve have ways of making you vork.

is merkel running new concentration camps?

SpaceTime

Bog Standard User wrote: »

is merkel running new concentration camps?

Eh, no.
I would suspect Merkel's more concerned about how these things are undermining job creation in Germany and in Europe tbh.

She's not really an ultra-right wing liberal, throw-open all the markets type and comes from a centrist party.