Goldina was making goods destined for sale in Next. Goldina is a long-standing company, but others open when they win a contract, hiring factory space and machinery, then close again when times get tough, leaving their workforce and other creditors unpaid. Workers, often recent immigrants from Turkey and elsewhere, often with little or no English and sometimes with questionable immigration or benefits status, dare not complain. They will simply seek a job elsewhere and cut their losses. According to government officials, trade unions and the more respectable employers, everyone is losing out.
Workers lose because their pay and conditions are often pitiful and their surroundings unsafe.
The government loses because taxes are not paid and benefits are often used, either legally or illegally, to make up low wages. Decent employers lose out because they cannot compete, and the trade unions find it almost impossible to organise in a community whose domestic and working lives are often transient in nature. Some of the workers are Kurdish asylum seekers, while others expect to return to Turkey after a spell working here. But the retailers are also responsible. They give the work to a buyer, who gives it to someone else, and they give it to someone else, so there is no control.