I returned from Bristol a happy boy. Having gone to Primark in Cardiff, I had managed to find a pair of trousers for the start of term. Time was running short and these trousers were reduced from £8 to £4. Then I saw some socks, £2. That makes no sense, £2-that's less than a pint in London! Of course it had crossed my mind that someone may have been exploited to produce these garments at such low a price. And yes, I had already seen the Panorama episode "Primark: On the rack" . If you haven't seen it, it's still on the BBC website. Whilst reporting back to my mum about Cardiff, I told her about the purchases I made and she raved on about how good Primark was etc-providing us with relatively decent quality at very low prices. So I thought I'd (hypocritically) give her a reality check and inform her about the Panorama episode and how Primark has now withdrawing many beaded products as they were clearly exposed as being made by child labourers and refugees. She gave the usual side of the arguement that without this kind of work, a lot of families would not be able to survive. I retorted with the textbook answer that child labour was wrong as kids have a right to liberty and free education and that child labour would act as an obstacle to gaining a good education and to progress further in life. Then she said something that stunned me: "It's not like that, if your dad and I weren't doing these types of piece-work, we would have starved. We sewed beads, made bracelets and plastic flowers. Without this we wouldn't be able to live. Education was free, but we then had to pay for books, clothes, a school bag, our lunch, bus fair etc. We had to buy a school badge to sew on our jackets otherwise we'd be put in detention. I remembering not daring to ask my parents for money to buy a school badge as they were already paying for our books and other essentials. It was nott hat they did not love us, they simply could not afford to give us any more and we recognised that." She continued, "We had to earn that extra money to feed the family, so we made plastic flowers. We'd get them in batches of 12 dozens. Those 144 flowers would take each person 3 to 4 days to make and bring in about $1HK (Approx 10pence) per box . We daren't even steal them, maybe we'd take one out of a batch of 144 to put in the house, a symbol of our hard work, but no more. We couldn't risk that-even plastic flowers were items of luxury for the affluent. Basically, we had to work to support ourselves and the family and kids weren't allowed in factories so our parents would bring home these boxes of plastic flowers and beads to be sewn on to garments and we'd all sit on the floor and sew away and make these flowers." It just didn't seem right and it's not right that they got paid so little, surely companies can't just exploit people like this. But my mother saw it differently: "Well companies like Primark don't employ people directly, they send off their orders to factories. The factories who produce the best product for the best price wins the contract. It is the factories then who may decide to go lean on production and outsource the work to families. But we produced good products at really low prices, we never ripped off the western world. It's true, it's not ideal, but you don't understand, the reality is people in China need this kind of work to support their families. It's a sad fact that we don't have a government tax system that can pay for free health care and benefits, but that's just how it is." For me, it still is the responsibility for Primark to check that their factories do not outsource their work to children and that workers do have good working conditions. But I guess the world is harsh and fair trade may simply be impractical. My mother still has no hard feelings about companies such as Primark: "You see a lot of these TV programmes reporting about the poor working conditions and children threading beads etc, but for them (at this moment in time) there is no alternative. They (the media) simply don't want you to buy these goods, but if less people went to stores like Primark and Matalan, the demand for goods would drop and a lot of people would be out of jobs. They (the labourers) would not be able to feed themselves, they would not be able to live." It's a sad fact, but I could not help but agree with my mother that sometimes reality and simply surviving sometimes stands above moral ideals. Of course it would be great if everyone got paid a fair wage and children did not have to work, but of course this would mean stores like Primark would not exist and if they did their prices would be 10 times higher than they are now. This also begs the question, "if labourers in the third world were paid a fair(er) wage, say ten times more, so approximately £5 a day, would you be prepared to pay ten times more for your Nike trainers (£500) or £40 for a pair of trousers at Primark?" For me, I feel what this question emphasises more than anything else is not only do labourers sacrifice their well-being and wage for our luxuries and comfort, but more importantly that Multi-national companies like Nike and Primark could clearly reduce their profit margins in order to pay their workers (more) fairly. But they don't and maybe it's not that simple. I'm not an economist, but I know that if Nike reduced their profit margin, they would demand that the distributors make a smaller cut, this would mean wholesalers and retailers making a smaller cut. These retailers are ultimately people like you and I, so the question is not that simple and neither is the solution. We would all have to make cuts in order for the system to work. And would we do that, would we be OK to all get paid 5 times less, so other people can get paid 5 times more? I know it's not that simple, it just wouldn't be practical. Is it OK to accept that the world is unfair and do nothing about it? If not, then what can we do? How can we all make a small sacrifice so that others don't have to sacrifice so much? | 
