Forced labour in supply chains

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2021

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labour in the vast cotton fields of its western region of Xinjiang, according to BBC reports. As a result, apparel companies are facing mounting pressure to withdraw from economic ties with the region, and certainly to stop buying cotton from there. Chloe Cranston of UK-based Anti-Slavery International lays out the case for why companies need to avoid Xinjiang. But as we’ll hear from Andrew Morgan of veteran thread supplier Coats, even though the moral imperative is there, the apparel industry is not completely unified in motivation for change. And we’ll hear from two companies, boutique fashion brand Eileen Fisher and global furniture mainstay IKEA, on their efforts to have an ethical supply chain.

Producer: Frey Lindsay

(Picture credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC.
0:05.1	Coming up, slavery in the supply chain, is it time that brands took a stand against forced
0:10.8	labour in China?
0:12.0	They need to urgently increase their work, particularly around the Uyghur region,
0:15.9	to make sure that they know where their cotton is coming for them.
0:18.7	We hear from two Western brands who've pulled out from the Xinjiang region.
0:22.9	Is it time that firms joined forces on this?
0:25.8	We're not going to solve this problem,
0:27.8	having individual brands tackle this on their own with their own dollar.
0:31.8	Many of us overlap.
0:33.5	There are multiple brands sourcing from any given supplier.
0:36.1	So why not try to figure out an industry-wide solution?
0:39.6	Washing out the stain of slave labor. That's Business Daily from the BBC.
0:47.6	A class of Uyghur men from a couple of years ago undergoing re-education as it's known.
1:01.0	They're learning Chinese in this case.
1:02.8	Here on Business Daily, we've looked a number of times at the growing evidence
1:06.6	that hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim citizens like these
1:10.4	from the western Chinese region
1:12.3	of Xinjiang are being dragooned into forced labour facilities, working in conditions,
1:18.5	just like this woman described to me last year.
1:25.5	The inmates in the camp were given only two minutes for going to the toilet.
1:29.6	If you spent more than that, they shocked you in the head with an electric baton.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.