promoting bad against good

There is a pattern, which sometimes happens by chance.

Ethical Fashion Forum finds a UK business that is close to collapse, ignores it and loudly promotes the competition from bad countries

Robbing in a hospital is one way to describe it.

• Remploy

  Ethical Fashion Forum promoted a firm like Remploy in Bangladesh but were silent about Remploy in the UK closing down. Ethical Fashion Forum had got their hands on money for training small business owners the year before, running seminars in Newham College, so they ought to have known what advice to give to business owners about where to get clothes made in the UK - including Remploy. Otherwise, I think the people who paid taxes via London Development Agency for the training seminars should get their money back.

• Equity Shoes

  Ethical Fashion Forum ran a public-funded set of training lectures about buying from Co-ops, but left-out Equity Shoes, the large hundred-year-old shoemaking co-op in Leicester that went bust the same year. Oddly enough, a Leicester MP was minister at the Department for Business at the time, which gave grants to overseas visitors to London Fashion Week and so can influence what goes on show. That year I think it was Terra Plana footwear made in China and shown in the Estethica room, which is meant to sound a bit like "ethical" I suppose. The MP signed-off the grant payments without knowing or caring. Oh and one of the speakers was Ben Ramsden of Pants to Poverty who's Pi Foundation claimed to promote worker-owned manufacturing.

• JJ Blackledge

  wallet manufacturers in Manchester. This firm that made flat goods for the corporate gift market went bust the same weekend that Ethical Fashion Forum spoke at a public-funded seminar called "Making it Ethically in China", which was held a mile or two away in Manchester.

• James Grove Buttons

  About the time this Birmingham factory went bust, and someone was trying to set-up a smaller company with the same tools called Grove Pattern Buttons (hornbuttons.co.uk), Ethical Fashion Forum advertised a member on their mailing list. That ethical claim of this "fellowship 500" member was that these are (1) "locally sourced buttons" from (2) "the poorest areas of the local Panama community". "Locally sourced" is a stylish bit of cheek as an ethical claim, a bit like "nutricious food" - something McDonalds claimed could mean anything but water. The buttons are sold by Miami company and sourced in Panama, according to Ethical Fashion Forum, but when emailed the suppliers say it might be Equador; they're not quite sure. They are sure that they're harvested by low-paid artizans, which follows if you buy from countries without a welfare state and pay as little as you can - even though Panama is a wealthy 100 year-old stable country quite capable of sorting-out poverty if their government wanted to. The third ethical claim - (3) is "100% eco-friendly and sustanable", but I guess that's before airmail. One final thing to say: the american buttons were something I'd rather wear, made out of large nuts, but maybe the machines are the same whatever the material.

There is a history to this. The Make Poverty History campaign was run by establishment groups with help from government ministries, to promote a big vague consensus within which opposite ideas could exist - with examples from George Monbiot in his "Africa's new best friends" article. He could have mentioned that the same vague consensus wants to wipe out manufacturing that bears the cost of a welfare state, but that's another hidden contradiction in the EFF lobby group that got so much help from government in setting-up, with free displays of its founding members' products at government institutions from the V&A to the Crafts Council to London Fashion Week, a sympathetic magazine published by the BBC and even a special study option offered by a Northern Irish exam board. No wonder the people who search online for this kind of ethical fashion tend to be in London, away from the industry that they wipe-out.

One Ethical Fashion Forum founder member - Pants to Poverty - had a problem. If you googled their name and address, you get a list of pages about poverty in Tower Hamlets, within walking distance of their office. That's probably why they had to close; their customers among Guardian-reading Londoners noticed the contradiction. Pantstopoverty.org.uk is a new site that spells-out the argument and might sell UK-made pants in future. The landlord, Rich Mix, now publishes a list of tenants on its web site with no Futerra fashion-related agencies left at all, and mail is returned to senders "not known". Pants was one of the earlier departures, leaving a few days ahead of Tower Hamlets trading standards officers, chasing-up claims of non-delivered pants.

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Planb4fashion is a blog by Veganline.com which is a vegan shoe shop

We pay several times for each badly-run country

We pay several times for each badly-run country.

We benefit once, or I do, because I'm wearing Primark's cheapest jeans.

♦ We pay in having fewer jobs, because there's less rag trade here.

♦ We pay in having fewer taxes for the same reason.

♦ We pay because our politicians send our army to those poor and unstable parts of the world that have no secondary education or welfare state.

♦ We pay in having unstable desperate parts of the world that refugees and economic migrants leave, overcrowding parts of the UK.

♦ We probably pay in the spread of disease - thinking more about African governments which choose not to set-up a health service.

♦ We pay 0.7% of our GDP, out of our taxes, towards the social services bills of badly-run countries like Bangladesh. Pakistani taxpayers pay less than that for their own few state hospitals, and many Pakistani MPs do not even bother to pay Pakistani tax. It's probably the same in Bangladesh or India.

So we have all paid six times for my pair of trousers and politicians' failure to write a proper tariff against goods from badly-run countries. That's before any ultuism towards people in Bangladesh. My jeans are beginning to feel a bit special now!

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Planb4fashion is a blog by Veganline.com which is a vegan shoe shop

Cheap factory expensive shop

Cheap factory expensive shop

http://www.guardian.co.uk/…/2013/jul/28/india-sweated-labour - after reading six pages of comment after this article I discover

(1) a challenging rant with a challenging headline that offers no solution begs six pages or more of feebdack on a national newspaper site

(2) the fairtrade label is not completely trusted; people could do with a link on a swing-tag or something to help them check the checking system. Someone said it's a bit like labels on eggs - there's a lot to learn. Others distrust all claims. The article itself is a rant that lumps all ethical claims together and asks consumer to ask more questions

(4) UK-made or European-made goods are looked-for but not found. No surprise when our government rules-out compulsory labels to say where clothes come from, and ignores requests for more data from which to write trade directories.

(5) Several people - not just me - ask why the Bangladeshi government doesn't do its job and introduce some list of changes if it is to get 0% tariff access to the European market. This is in the spirit of the rant article, which questions respect for Indian authorities "Last week India's powerful planning commission claimed that poverty was at a record low of 21.9% of the population. It did so on the basis that people could live on 26 rupees (29p) a day in rural areas (33 rupees in urban areas). Many inside India baulk at this. Few outside the country did so."

(6) Every Guardian reader, Indian or British, is puzzled by the cost of shipping something to well-organised warehouse and from there to branches of some smart and advertised chain store in shopping centres or high streets. Nike and Addidas may be extreme in how much their brand costs and matters, but everything sold in modern shopping centres carries a big price tag for the shopping centre itself and getting stuff there, branded or not. The common debate is why M and S charge so much more than Primark when the technicalities of their shops are only so-much different and what they pay their suppliers is only so-much different. Nobody knows! One reader suggested that Gieves and Hawkes of Saville Row now sends some of its handmade work to India and back without the client knowing.

This is the article copied from the Guardian, with a link.

Admit it. You love cheap clothes. And you don't care about child slave labour

Until three years ago I did not believe in magic. But that was before I began investigating how western brands perform a conjuring routine that makes the great Indian rope trick pale in comparison. Now I'm beginning to believe someone has cast a spell over the world's consumers.

This is how it works. Well Known Company makes shiny, pretty things in India or China. The Observer reports that the people making the shiny, pretty things are being paid buttons and, what's more, have been using children's nimble little fingers to put them together. There is much outrage, WKC professes its horror that it has been let down by its supply chain and promises to make everything better. And then nothing happens. WKC keeps making shiny, pretty things and people keep buying them. Because they love them. Because they are cheap. And because they have let themselves be bewitched.

Last week I revealed how poverty wages in India's tea industry fuel a slave trade in teenage girls whose parents cannot afford to keep them. Tea drinkers were naturally upset. So the ethical bodies that certified Assam tea estates paying a basic 12p an hour were wheeled out to give the impression everything would be made right.

For many consumers, that is enough. They want to feel that they are being ethical. But they don't want to pay more. They are prepared to believe in the brands they love. Companies know this. They know that if they make the right noises about behaving ethically, their customers will turn a blind eye.

So they come down hard on suppliers highlighted by the media. They sign up to the certification schemes – the Ethical Trading Initiative, Fairtrade, the Rainforest Alliance and others. Look, they say, we are good guys now. We audit our factories. We have rules, codes of conduct, mission statements. We are ethical. 

But they are not. What they have done is purchase an ethical fig leaf.

In the last few years, companies have got smarter. It is rare now to find children in the top level of the supply chain, because the brands know this is PR suicide. But the wages still stink, the hours are still brutal, and the children are still there, stitching away in the backstreets of the slums.

Drive east out of Delhi for an hour or so into the industrial wasteland of Ghaziabad and take a stroll down some of the back lanes. You might want to watch your step, to avoid falling into the stinking open drains. Take a look through some of the doorways. See the children stitching the fine embroidery and beading? Now take a stroll through your favourite mall and have a look at the shelves. Recognise some of that handiwork? You should.

Suppliers now subcontract work out from the main factory, maybe more than once. The work is done out of sight, the pieces sent back to the main factory to be finished and labelled. And when the auditors come round the factory, they can say that there were no children and all was well. Because audits are part of the act. Often it is as simple as two sets of books, one for the brand, one for themselves. The brand's books say everyone works eight hours a day with a lunch break. The real books show the profits from 16-hour days and no days off all month.

Need fire extinguishers to tick the safety box? Hire them in for the day. The lift is a deathtrap? Stick a sign on it to say it is out of use and the inspector will pass it by. The dark arts thrive in the inspection business. We, the consumers, let them do this because we want the shiny, pretty thing. And we grumble that times are tight, we can't be expected to pay more and, anyway, those places are very cheap to live in.

This is the other part of the magic trick, the western perception of the supplier countries, born of ignorance and embarrassment. India, more than most, knows how to play on this. Governments and celebrities fall over themselves to laud India for its progress. India is on the up, India is booming, India is very spiritual, India is vibrant. Sure, the workers are poor, but they are probably happy.

No, they are not. India has made the brands look rank amateurs in the field of public relations. Yes, we know it is protectionist, yes, we know working conditions are often diabolical, but we are in thrall to a country that seems impossibly exotic.

Colonial guilt helps. The British in particular feel awkward about India. We stole their country and plundered their riches. We don't feel able to criticise. But we should. China still gets caught out, but wages have risen and working conditions have improved. India seems content to rely on no one challenging it.

Last week India's powerful planning commission claimed that poverty was at a record low of 21.9% of the population. It did so on the basis that people could live on 26 rupees (29p) a day in rural areas (33 rupees in urban areas). Many inside India baulk at this. Few outside the country did so.

But times are tough, consumers say. This is the most pernicious of the ideas the brands have encouraged. Here's some maths from an Observer investigation last year in Bangalore. We can calculate that women on the absolute legal minimum wage, making jeans for a WKC, get 11p per item. Now wave your own wand and grant them the living monthly wage – the £136 the Asia Floor Wage Alliance calculates is needed to support a family in India today (and bear in mind that the women are often the sole earners). It is going to cost a fortune, right? No. It will cost 15p more on the labour cost of each pair of jeans.
The very fact that wages are so low makes the cost of fixing the problem low, too. Someone has to absorb the hit, be it the brand, supplier, middleman, retailer or consumer. But why make this a bad thing? 

Why be scared of it?

Here is the shopper, agonising over ethical or cheap. What if they can do both? What if they can pluck two pairs of jeans off the rail and hold them up. One costs £20. One costs £20.15. It has a big label on it, which says "I'm proud to pay 15p more for these jeans. I believe everyone has the right to a decent standard of living. My jeans were made by a happy worker who was paid the fair rate for the job."
Go further. Stitch it on to the jeans themselves. I want those jeans. I want to know I'm not wearing something stitched by kids kept locked in backstreet godowns, never seeing the light of day, never getting a penny. I want to feel clean. And I want the big brands and the supermarkets to help me feel clean.

I want people to say to them: "You deceived us. You told us you were ethical. We want you to change. We want you to police your supply chain as if you care. Name your suppliers. Open them to independent inspection. We want to trust you again, we really do, because we love your products. Know what? We don't mind paying a few pennies more if you promise to chip in too."

And here's the best part: I think they would sell more. I think consumers would be happier and workers would be happier. And if I can spend less time trawling through fetid backstreets looking for the truth, I'll be happier.

guardian.co.uk | By Gethin Chamberlain

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Photo of ten "Young boys rescued from child traffickers at Katihar station in Bihar state, India, waiting for their parents to collect them". I have no idea what stories are hidden here, but know that some kind of welfare state in more of India could be part of the answer

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Planb4fashion is a blog by Veganline.com which is a vegan shoe shop

MPs say ending violence against women is a key to ending poverty

MPs say ending violence against women is the key to ending poverty - News from Parliament - UK Parliamenthttp://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/international-development-committee/news/vawg-report-substantive/Ending violence against women and girls is the litmus test for whether ‘development’ is working in poor countries such as Afghanistan, say MPs in report by the Commons…

A third of girls in the former third world are married by the age of 18. This could by why the countries are overpopulated and the poor in those countries are very poor.

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Planb4fashion blog posts are by Veganline.com which is a vegan shoe shop