UK High street employs sweatshop workers

Fast fashion, cheap labour, so the slogan goes. Some of the biggest names on the British high street are still contracting factories who continue to abuse human rights. An Observer investigation has found staff at an Indian supplier to Gap,

Next and Marks & Spencer working up to 16 hours a day.

M&S, Gap and Next have all launched their own inquiries into the abuses and pledged to end the practice of excessive overtime, which is in flagrant breach of the industry's ethical trading initiative (ETI) and Indian labour law.

Some workers say they were paid at half the legal overtime rate. Gap, which uses the same factory as Next, confirmed it had found wage violations and gave its supplier a deadline of midnight last night to repay workers who lost out. M&S says it has yet to see evidence to support the wage claims.

Workers also say that those who refuse to work the extra hours have been told to find new jobs. Those in the factory supplying Gap and Next also claim staff who refused to work extra hours were threatened and fired, a practice defined under international law as forced labour and outlawed around the world. The factory has pledged to apologise and reinstate anyone who lost their job.

Next said it had found the situation to be "deplorable" and the chairman of the Indian company it uses has apologised and promised to make amends, blaming demand for workers at the forthcoming Commonwealth Games in Delhi for leaving factories short of staff.

Gap admitted wage and overtime violations and ordered its supplier to reduce working hours to within the legal limits and to refund workers who have been illegally underpaid.

Marks & Spencer admitted its supplier had been operating excessive overtime but said it had acted quickly to tackle the problem. It admitted its own audits had found a number of other violations, which it described as "high-risk issues in documentation and conditions".

The Observer investigation found the factories were using workers hired through middlemen who paid them as little as 25p an hour, in the case of Gap and Next, and 26p an hour for M&S.

Workers at the factory used by Gap and Next said they had been required to put in up to eight hours a day in overtime, for which they claim to have been paid at half the legal minimum rate required by the ETI and Indian law. Some workers at the same factory said they had to work seven days a week, a practice condemned by their union as "slave labour".

All three companies have told the Observer that they are totally committed to ethical trading and will not tolerate abuses in their supply chain. All say the problems were detected by their own auditing processes and that they have taken swift action to tackle them.

Image: Factory worker
Source: Observer