profits made on the back of child labour

Profits made on the back of child labour: report

Next time you open your wardrobe, consider this: more than 90 per cent of clothing brands including Rivers, Supre and Lacoste are likely to engage in some form of child labour.
A damning report on the Australian fashion industry shows 93 per cent of brands do not know where their cotton is sourced from, making it likely child labour and exploitation have been involved when the bulk of the world's cotton is sourced from countries that force children to pick cotton harvests.
Companies risk losing customers.

In Uzbekistan, the world's fourth largest cotton producer, children as young as 10 are taken out of school and coerced by the Karimov government to work 70-hour weeks in cotton fields.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that there is a high chance that we're all wearing clothing that has been made by slave labour," the founder of ethical brand Etiko, Nick Savaidis, said.
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The Australian Fashion Report, published on Monday, investigated 40 companies that produce 128 clothing brands sold in Australia, ranking them on the transparency and monitoring of their supply chains and ethical codes.
The report, supported by the International Labour Rights Forum and Baptist World Aid, looked at three stages of the garment supply chain: cotton sourcing; fabric dyeing and weaving, and manufacturing.
For years children have been widely used to support the textile supply chain, says Carolyn Kitto, spokeswoman for labour rights group Stop the Traffik.
"Children in the garment industry are sought after because they have nimble fingers," she said. "Beads and embellishments are often sewn on by children." Their small hands also make it easier to pick the cotton crops, she said.
Of the top 10 cotton producers in the world, including the United States, China, Pakistan, Brazil and Uzbekistan, Australia is the only country not to use child labour, the report said.
Brands Supre, Abercrombie & Fitch, Rivers, Lacoste and Specialty Fashion Group (which owns Millers and Katies) were labelled by the report as the worst for failing to boycott Uzbekistan cotton and having murky standards at the final manufacturing stage.
These same groups were condemned for their lack of ethical standards in April following the collapse of the Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh, where at least 1129 garment workers were killed.
Report co-author Gershon Nimbalker said the deeper they looked into the companies' supply chains – down to the harvesting of cotton fields by children in Uzbekistan – the less information was available from the companies' surveyed.
Mr Nimbalker said it was "disturbing" that so few companies investigated the workers' conditions at the beginning of the supply chain where some of the worst abuses occur.
"About 40 per cent of companies know who the manufacturers were in the [final] stage but that dramatically drops; when you get to the cotton picking stage that [knowledge] is 7 per cent," he said.
The retail promise of "on-trend fashion at affordable prices" has put enormous pressure on factory owners in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Mr Savaidis said.
In order to keep their prices low, subcontractors supplying the cotton and fabric end up using child labour, he said.
Brands Adidas, Cue, H&M, Inditex (owner of Zara) and fair trade clothing companies Etiko and 3Fish were rated as most transparent.
The Australian Retailers Association chief executive Russell Zimmerman said there was "no simple answer" for companies to better understand their supply chains.
"Companies risk losing customers if they are not aware of how their goods are coming through the supply chain," he said.
Of the companies surveyed, only 20 actively boycotted the use of Uzbekistan cotton. About 35 per cent of the cotton used in Bangladesh comes from Uzbekistan, the report showed. Imports of Bangladeshi clothes into Australia were worth $287 million in 2012.
Companies including Rivers, Woolworths, Coles, Quicksilver and Lululemon do not boycott the use of Uzbekistan cotton.
Supre, Rivers and Specialty Fashion Group did not respond to Fairfax Media's questions in time for publication.

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