Chinese forced labour: The brands
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are Western brands doing enough to keep forced labour out of their supply chains? Ed Butler speaks to researcher Darren Byler at the University of Colorado, who says tracing products from slave labour institutions in China's Xinjiang province to the west is not easy. Alan McClay from the Better Cotton Initiative explains what they do to monitor slave labour. Kate Larsen, a private consultant specialising in supply chain problems, says Western firms are only slowly understanding the scale of the problems they face, and what they have to do to tackle them.
(Photo: The Chinese flag behind razor wire at a housing compound in China's western Xinjiang region, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service in our second program, |
| 0:07.6 | looking at reports of mass-forced labour in Western China. |
| 0:13.4 | They locked us in the prison. We went through the big iron gates. |
| 0:17.8 | They changed our clothes and they shaved our heads. |
| 0:21.6 | We were just sitting there like zombies, doing the same work over and over again, |
| 0:26.7 | having no right to stand up until you were told. |
| 0:31.9 | The inmates in the camp were given only two minutes for going to the toilet. |
| 0:35.7 | If you spent more than that, they shocked you in the head with an electric baton. |
| 0:40.5 | There was no freedom at all. |
| 0:42.5 | The stories from Xinjiang are Western firms complicit in slave labour. |
| 0:48.0 | That's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:52.0 | Go, go, go, go, go, go, way they're there. The sound there of Uighur, |
| 1:03.0 | shouting out the company's slogan in Xinjiang. |
| 1:10.0 | As we heard in yesterday's program, relentless indoctrination like this |
| 1:15.2 | and forced labour appear to be happening on a massive scale in this remote western region of |
| 1:21.5 | China. The government denies forcing detainees to work, but what's clear is that there |
| 1:26.7 | is now a coordinated government policy. |
| 1:29.5 | It includes grants and incentives to encourage Chinese companies into the region |
| 1:34.2 | to put local Muslim Uyghurs to work, usually paying them little or even nothing at all. |
| 1:40.3 | This Kazakh survivor of the camps says brutal conditions made it hard to discover exactly who you were even working for. |
| 1:51.8 | Nobody told us what the company was or who we were working for. |
| 1:56.3 | If you ask, they would just beat us up. |
... |
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