Would you buy a T-shirt made with slave labour?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
China is accused of detaining millions of people from the Uighur ethnic minority and forcing them to work in factories. Pressure is mounting on foreign businesses to ensure material they source from China does not benefit from that forced labour. Alison Killing, an architect and investigator has found that 268 detention facilities have been built in the Xinjiang province in North-West China in just the last few years. Supply chain expert Kate Larsen says companies are often more at risk of exposure to forced labour than they might realise. But Craig Allen of the US China Business Council says US protections already exist to keep companies away from Uighur labour. And Max Zenglein of the Mercator Institute for China Studies says there are substantial incentives for companies to look the other way.
Produced by Frey Lindsay
(Picture: An alleged Uighur detention facility. Picture credit: Getty Images.)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.2 | Today, how hard is it for international firms to figure out if they're using slave labour from China? |
| 0:12.0 | We're reaching a point now where if you ask a supplier, if they have weaker workers in their worker population, |
| 0:18.1 | many would realise that it's a risk to tell you that they do, |
| 0:21.8 | and they're not going to disclose that. |
| 0:23.5 | Yes, the plight of China's Uyghur population is on our radar today. |
| 0:27.3 | Millions may be in conditions of forced labor there are firms doing all they can to say no. |
| 0:33.4 | Companies as well as European member states will hold back any form of political criticisms on human rights or the like |
| 0:41.9 | because there is such large economic interests at stake. |
| 0:46.0 | That's all to come in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:59.6 | It really was one of the more haunting images to emerge in the news this month. |
| 1:04.7 | Video of Med and Gapar, a former fashion model, a Uyga, self-filmed, |
| 1:09.7 | in what looks like a Chinese detention centre in Xinjiang in Western China. |
| 1:12.6 | In the video, he gazes silently at the camera, |
| 1:16.3 | showing the handcuffs that chain him to the bed in a bare cell. |
| 1:21.9 | Outside the barred window, we can hear this, apparently, endless propaganda announcement. |
| 1:29.9 | The woman in Chinese is explaining the truth, as she calls it, of Uyghur politics and history. |
| 1:35.8 | His family said he'd sent this film after guards accidentally left him access to his possessions, |
| 1:39.2 | which included his cell phone. He hasn't been heard of since. |
| 1:44.8 | So these new places are absolutely huge. Several of the ones that we found that were completed through 2019, they could house over 10,000 people. That's the voice of Alison Killing. She's an architect |
| 1:50.6 | by training, but she also does open source reporting and geospatial analysis for investigative |
| 1:56.7 | journalists. She's just completed a study for BuzzFeed News, which found that some 268 detention |
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