Everyone knows what's going on, they just choose to ignore it most of the time. How can we really know whether our clothes are made ethically when they're outsourced to other countries? At one point they said one of the young girls was working on clothes for another European retailer but didn't name them. It could have been anyone. Primark got the brunt this time like Nike and Gap and M&S before them. Who'll be next?

Posted by: Rebecca | June 24, 2008 11:05 AM

I thought you did a great job on this, Abi!

I just could not believe that Primark's response was to stop using the factories that had been guilty of using child labour. They have created the problem by putting so much pressure on the factories who work for them (often at a loss), and all they do is drop them when things look bad for them. I kept thinking about that little Tamil girl who had been sent over by her parents. It was bad enough that she was having to work so hard whilst living in those conditions, but now she doesn't even have the work to sustain her.

Primark should be putting some of their profits back into the communities that have made them.

Posted by: Sally | June 24, 2008 11:08 AM

Well done Abi - this issue is at the center of ethical fashion and what it means in social justice terms.
Primark's shock! horror! at the findings were laughable “We are appalled, we feel let down and we are taking all the action we can to prevent this happening again.”
Everyone interested in the ethics of fashion must ask 2 questions - Is it really believable that high volume, low mark-ups, absence of big ad budgets and low overheads is what allows Primark to sell at the prices they do, to become the fastest growing part of Associated British Foods and the 2nd biggest clothing retailer (in volume terms) in the UK?
And, second, how genuine is the ethical cred of a company that, having been 'outed', cuts and runs. What of those children and their families now? We'd rather not dwell on the fact that they probably prefer very little money to none at all and so, in a perverse sense, were probably better off slogging for Primark than not at all. Odds are they are devastated by the turn of events. If it wasn't for such dire circumstances, the complicity that Primark says its a victim of, between workers, middlemen, subcontractors and others wouldn't exist.

Rather than be appalled and get out, Primark needs to invest resources in engaging with issues on the ground in places it chooses to take its business to. This means pressuring the Indian government to do more, supporting the best NGO efforts in children's welfare in India itself and monitoring the entire supply chain rather than just factory conditions. It is simply not enough to take your business to places like India and be an ostrich about what you are walking into. We now know too much about labour conditions in these countries to accept just this much from any company doing work there.

Good for Hippyshopper for making it clear what is really going on and encouraging consumer views on the matter.

Posted by: devidoll | June 24, 2008 11:36 AM

Will this make the slightest bit of difference? the herds who graze in my local Primark wouldn't know an ethical issue if it waggled its horny foot at them. The answer is to let that Irish fatcat know that somehow his beloved profits just might be ever so slightly threatened. He could add a 50p charge to all his garments and give the proceeds to an independent party who distribute it fairly. Think how much money that would make. And the grazing morons wouldn't even notice.

Posted by: jim B | June 24, 2008 4:12 PM