Jo Wood leads No 10 sweatshops drive
14 December 2009
Thousands tell PM to halt clothes abuse
Television star Jo Wood and schoolgirls hand in a giant multicolour T-shirt which shows their photographs among pictures of many of the thousands of people behind the campaign Love Fashion Hate Sweatshops.
Television star Jo Wood and schoolgirls today handed into Downing Street a huge T-shirt with their photographs among pictures of many of thousands of people behind a campaign against sweatshop fashion.
Jo - shocked by garment workers' hardship when she visited Bangladesh with fair trade fashion company and campaign backer People Tree - helped lead the handin.
The 14-year-old pupils - Nabila Bakar, Amine Aras and Nishat Tasnim - came from the 1400-student Mulberry girls' school in London's East End, which hosted a model United Nations conference on child labour and sweatshops after students backed the campaign.
The Love Fashion Hate Sweatshops campaign, organised by the charity War on Want, is the biggest-ever call for the British government to stop retailers, including supermarkets, exploiting overseas workers in developing countries.
It has also won support from pop singer Little Boots, actors Chloë Sevigny, Gael García Bernal and Ashley Jensen, and clothes designer Betty Jackson. Other backers include TV personality Tony Robinson, actor-playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, comedians Jo Brand and Francesca Martinez and gardener Bob Flowerdew.
Supportive public figures include Glenis Willmott, Labour leader in the European parliament, Fiona Hall, European leader for the Liberal Democrats, Green party leader Caroline Lucas, Jack Dromey, deputy general secretary of Unite, the UK's largest trade union, Mary Turner, president of the GMB union, Queen's Counsel Michael Mansfield, the leading human rights lawyer, human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, journalist John Pilger and cartoonist Martin Rowson.
Last week the charity's research showed that workers making Primark clothes in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka toil up to 84 hours a week and can earn as little as £19 a month - less than half a living wage.
And War on Want last December published another study which revealed that workers faced worse living standards than two years earlier amid similar exploitation in six Dhaka factories producing clothes for Primark, Tesco and Asda.
War on Want executive director John Hilary said: "Cheap fashion modelled on catwalk styles comes with a high price for garment workers in terrible pay and conditions. Retailers have broken their pledges to ensure them decent treatment. Now Gordon Brown must act to halt this abuse."
NOTES TO EDITORS: The charity's latest Primark research is at www.waronwant.org/news/press-releases/16730-new-sweatshop-row-hits-primark Its 2008 study Fashion Victims II is at www.waronwant.org/campaigns/supermarkets/fashion-victims/inform/16360-fashion-victims-ii
CONTACT: Paul Collins, War on Want media office (+44) (0)20 7549 0584 or (+44) (0)7983 550728
Image credit: Jon Spaull
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