How do we sort out the sweatshops?
I've paid £1,000 to save slumdog Dolly: She was only 13 when she met Liz Jones, slaving 12 hours a night, 7 days a week sewing sequins for UK fashion stores and living in squalor. Just look at her now! | Mail Online
I've paid £1,000 to save slumdog Dolly: She was only 13 when she met Liz Jones, slaving 12 hours a night, 7 days a week sewing sequins for UK fashion stores and living in squalor. Just look at her now!
Liz Jones first met Dolly on a visit to Bangladesh in summer 2010
She revisited Dolly recently to see her thriving after going back to school
What a shame, I thought, as I backed out of her bamboo square balanced precariously above an open sewer and tried not to touch the walls or step in excrement, that there were no black-suited security guards at her door.
You know the sort: they stand there, mute, as you enter boutiques on London’s Old Bond Street, making sure you’re not about to steal any of the merchandise.
They would have been more use here. Then perhaps Dolly would not have been working 12 hours a night, seven nights a week for 2,800 taka a month (the minimum wage in Bangladesh back then was 1,662 taka a month – about £15, or 50p a day), as an embroiderer in a garment factory.
Perhaps her hair would not be showing signs of malnutrition. Perhaps, too, she would be able to read and write her own name, and sleep.
‘What did you sew last night?’ I asked her. ‘Sequins,’ she whispered, worried I was going ask her to name names (like all garment workers, she was searched every morning as she left the factory in case she smuggled out a famous name’s label and gave it to the press).
Liz Jones first met Dolly on a visit to Bangladesh in summer 2010
She revisited Dolly recently to see her thriving after going back to school
What a shame, I thought, as I backed out of her bamboo square balanced precariously above an open sewer and tried not to touch the walls or step in excrement, that there were no black-suited security guards at her door.
You know the sort: they stand there, mute, as you enter boutiques on London’s Old Bond Street, making sure you’re not about to steal any of the merchandise.
They would have been more use here. Then perhaps Dolly would not have been working 12 hours a night, seven nights a week for 2,800 taka a month (the minimum wage in Bangladesh back then was 1,662 taka a month – about £15, or 50p a day), as an embroiderer in a garment factory.
Perhaps her hair would not be showing signs of malnutrition. Perhaps, too, she would be able to read and write her own name, and sleep.
‘What did you sew last night?’ I asked her. ‘Sequins,’ she whispered, worried I was going ask her to name names (like all garment workers, she was searched every morning as she left the factory in case she smuggled out a famous name’s label and gave it to the press).
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