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Supermarkets in Britain should be required to answer to an independent watchdog set up to protect workers in developing countries, a leading poverty charity has proposed.
ActionAid makes the suggestion in a study of the £450million ($915m) UK school uniform market, which supermarkets dominate.
The international agency, which is best known for its role in persuading European Union member states to commit to spend 0.7 per cent of their national growth on overseas development assistance, claims that a price war has driven down the production costs of uniforms to the point where sweated labour is now being used in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
A regulatory body ‘could relax the intense buying pressures faced by overseas suppliers and open up negotiating space for workers to improve pay and conditions’, it says, and also ensure ‘fair and reasonable’ contracts, remedy any breaches and punish errant supermarkets.
The body would ‘proactively monitor’ supermarkets for business practices such as setting unreasonably short lead times for orders.
Supermarkets, for their part, should develop ‘working estimates’ of the living wage in their key producer countries and ensure that prices paid to suppliers reflect these estimates, ActionAid says. At the same time, producer countries need to enforce labour laws.
ActionAid says this model, if successful, could be applied to certain other export industries important to developing countries, such as food, textiles, electronics and toys.
ActionAid makes the suggestion in a study of the £450million ($915m) UK school uniform market, which supermarkets dominate.
The international agency, which is best known for its role in persuading European Union member states to commit to spend 0.7 per cent of their national growth on overseas development assistance, claims that a price war has driven down the production costs of uniforms to the point where sweated labour is now being used in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
A regulatory body ‘could relax the intense buying pressures faced by overseas suppliers and open up negotiating space for workers to improve pay and conditions’, it says, and also ensure ‘fair and reasonable’ contracts, remedy any breaches and punish errant supermarkets.
The body would ‘proactively monitor’ supermarkets for business practices such as setting unreasonably short lead times for orders.
Supermarkets, for their part, should develop ‘working estimates’ of the living wage in their key producer countries and ensure that prices paid to suppliers reflect these estimates, ActionAid says. At the same time, producer countries need to enforce labour laws.
ActionAid says this model, if successful, could be applied to certain other export industries important to developing countries, such as food, textiles, electronics and toys.
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