shop - spend - save the economy

Fashion retailers are competing with each other on price and drive a hard bargain for manufacturers.

Consumers must bear some responsibility for their insatiable appetite for cheap, fast, often disposable fashion.

It is obvious to me that if a garment is very cheap it cannot have been produced ethically, but conversely I don’t believe that because a garment is expensive it is ethical.

It is a tricky road to tread if you wish to shop responsibly and supply chains are often opaque, but we can do our best to do a bit of homework on brands and shops we buy from.

"Made in England" is, to some extent, a marketing trick too. As we now know, it benefits fashion manufacturers because the supply chain is shorter and more reactive to market trends.

However, I'm not sure that something made in (for example) Turkey is necessarily less ethical. There could be a lower carbon footprint required to deliver the manufactured products, but the raw materials still have to be delivered from abroad (India?)

At least if workers are only paid £3 an hour, the money almost certainly buys more in many third world countries and provides employment, where there are few alternatives.

Unfortunately, some retailers jump on the fair trade/ethical bandwagon and use it as a marketing ploy to sell at a higher cost.

Plenty of other retailers aren't exactly squeaky clean.

It seems to me that honest retailers are missing a trick.
I , for one, am prepared to pay a decent price for clothes that are produced by people who are treated well and paid properly.
Why don’t the ones that have good practices tell us and be prepared to be scrutinised? I would buy from them. Not everyone would of course but it might make people think a bit before choosing who to buy from.

I am not sure that Primark deserves to be castigated for poor practice when other names don’t get a mention. If a T shirt costs £25 as opposed to £3 it doesn’t follow that that the workers producing the cheaper garment are treated in a worse way. It is up to the retailers, who are generally making huge profits, to ensure that standards of care are maintained.

Greeneyedgirl

I do agree janeainsworth and of course factory owners should not be absolved of responsibility, but I think we as consumers should try and shop ethically if we can.

I am also mindful of those who have little disposable income, and don’t have the luxury of choice.

You can't really blame consumers if they are presented with a choice between two almost identical T shirts - one a third the price of the other. The answer is not to give them the choice, but that runs counter to free market arguments. Some people are using the same argument with American meat - ie consumers should have the choice.

janeainsworth

Don’t worry everyone, the government’s thinking about paying us £500 to go out to restaurants and shops to help these businesses and hopefully develop everyone’s herd immunity
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/05/sunak-considers-500-vouchers-for-all-uk-adults-to-spend-in-covid-hit-firms

I agree. From what I've seen, the vouchers will be for places of entertainment. I have absolutely no intention of going to a pub or a restaurant for months to come, so I expect I won't use my vouchers.

If I were being cynical, they look like a way of subsidising places like Weatherspoons. If I could use my vouchers to buy books (even if I could only use them in high street booksellers rather than Amazon), I'd be more likely to use them.

We have a not-for-profit cinema in my town. If I could use the vouchers to buy tickets and enable the cinema to open at half capacity (thus maintaining social distancing), I'd use them too.

I do agree janeainsworth and of course factory owners should not be absolved of responsibility, but I think we as consumers should try and shop ethically if we can.

I am also mindful of those who have little disposable income, and don’t have the luxury of choice.

merlotgran

*LadyBella*, At the beginning of the year I was sitting in an outpatients waiting room with DH reading a magazine article about how we could take steps to avoid unnecessary plastic in our supermarket shopping. It was entitled, 'Caring for the Environment.' I cast my eyes down the list thinking, Yep! We do all that.

Fast forward three months and our deliveries were arriving in oceans of plastic. Having sat up until midnight on numerous occasions to book a slot, all I cared about was getting the delivery.

It's a topsy turvy world in more than one way at the moment.

Tesco has now started delivering in much bigger bags, which they claim use less plastic than a number of smaller carrier bags. In mitigation, they do make ideal cat litter tray liners, so at least I'm using them for something else.

(Sorry - that's a bit off topic.)

Some people can only afford to pay £3 for a T shirt which is why the queues outside Primark were so long when they reopened.

It doesn’t make it right by any means

kittylester

Boohoo must be stupid if they thought the really, really cheap clothing they were having made was under decent conditions!

I doubt if the Boohoo directors are stupid, so there's only one alternative.

The people who enable sweatshops are consumers who buy tea shirts for £3 and dresses for not much more
I agree Greeneyedgirl but someone must have been turning a blind eye to this somewhere along the line with brown envelopes possibly being involved too.
There are regulations to prevent exploitation of workers & responsibility lies with those who should be enforcing them.
Anyone who buys a t-shirt for £3 is complicit, but not ultimately responsible.
That’s down to the factory owners who I hope are prosecuted and get their just deserts.

The people who enable sweatshops are consumers who buy tea shirts for £3 and dresses for not much more without sparing a thought on how it can be possible to pay workers a fair wage with such cheap goods.

We have got used to buying cheap factory farmed food and cheap clothing, but if we want workers to be paid more, and animals to be kept humanely we will have to pay for it.

Boohoo must be stupid if they thought the really, really cheap clothing they were having made was under decent conditions!

Exactly kittylester, silent people without a voice. I read that Boohoo are one of the biggest customers of these illegal sweat shops, perhaps unknowingly of course. Because the clothing is made here in the uk they were able to very quickly change their orders from summer frocks to comfy leisure wear as people went into lockdown, whereas those retailers who had ordered from the sweatshops in India, China etc., were stuck with deliveries of orders which had been made months previously and were still on a container ship. I applaud companies who use UK based manufacturers, but there does need to be checks that there is not exploitation.

Some of the food processing factories have shown up appalling conditions for the migrant workers. There have been outbreaks of coronavirus in three of the factories in Wales.

They live twelve or more to a small house and bed hop as some work days while others work nights.

Some of the workers were afraid to stay at home if they were ill so the virus was rife amongst them.

Not just migrant women, gill but men too. And mostly illegal immigrants who daren't report it.

The authorities on the ground must have known and did nothing.

The sweat shops where people were being illegally underpaid are in Leicester, where by a strange coincidence, the infection rate is unusually high. I would assume that most of the people working in these ghastly places are migrant women with insufficient English language skills to do anything about it, even assuming they knew where to go and who to report it to.

LadyBella, At the beginning of the year I was sitting in an outpatients waiting room with DH reading a magazine article about how we could take steps to avoid unnecessary plastic in our supermarket shopping. It was entitled, 'Caring for the Environment.' I cast my eyes down the list thinking, Yep! We do all that.

Fast forward three months and our deliveries were arriving in oceans of plastic. Having sat up until midnight on numerous occasions to book a slot, all I cared about was getting the delivery.

It's a topsy turvy world in more than one way at the moment.

I don't buy clothes, I don't drink and I don't eat out. No good to me.

I don't understand economics. But surely it would be better not to shop and spend therefore saving the environment.

Don’t worry everyone, the government’s thinking about paying us £500 to go out to restaurants and shops to help these businesses and hopefully develop everyone’s herd immunity
www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jul/05/sunak-considers-500-vouchers-for-all-uk-adults-to-spend-in-covid-hit-firms

Surely it would be H&S, Environmental Health, and other statutory bodies who would take action? If there was political will, there would be a way.

What are they expected to do? If the factory owners have broken the law its a police job. Where are the unions?

Jane10
Evidence was presented to the Select Committee in 2018 proving that 1,000s of textile workers were/are being underpaid. The government dismissed all the evidence ?