After the Spice Girls’ T-shirt shock, five more sweatshop scandals
- Celebrities including Beyoncé and the Kardashians, and fast fashion labels such as H&M and Zara have all been caught up in scandals over exploitative labour practices
- Workers in factories in China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Brazil were making their clothes in terrible conditions
The Spice Girls found themselves with some unwanted publicity this week when an investigation found T-shirts sold to raise money for British charity Comic Relief’s “gender justice” campaign were made in a Bangladesh factory where women earn just 35 pence (45 US cents) an hour.
The charity tops – bearing the message #IWannaBeASpiceGirl – were produced by women expected to work up to 16 hours a day, according to The Guardian. Money raised from the T-shirts, which cost £19.40, will be used to help “champion equality for women and girls here in the UK,” according to Comic Relief.
Members of the English pop group that formed in 1994 and recently announced a reunion tour said they were “deeply shocked and appalled” by the reports.
It’s not the first time a brand or celebrity has been swept up in a sweatshop scandal. Here are five more:
Zara
In August 2011, a raid on a Zara contractor in São Paulo, Brazil, found immigrants working in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. Fifteen workers were rescued from the sweatshop – one just aged 14. The Brazilian government listed 52 charges against Inditex, Zara’s parent company. Inditex claimed the contractor, AHA, employed the workers illegally without their knowledge. Zara is a family business founded in 1975 in La Coruna, northwest Spain, by Amancio Ortega, who has become Spain’s richest man and the seventh richest in the world.
