Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Italian journalists expose Dhaka's textile inferno - Millions of workers exploited and enslaved

RAI, the state run italian radio and television broadcasting network
has just featured a report by italian journalists on the Dhaka's
textile inferno. The report follows the collaps of an 8 storey -
illegally constructed - building used as a textile factory. Back on
April last year, 74 workers died in there and many hundreds were
severely injured and rescued from beneath the rubbles.
The report documented how millions of workers and their childrens
endure a slave-like status in appalling conditions in Dhaka,
Bangladesh.
It's more than 25 years since western textile and foot wear industries
have started exploited the low cost manpower in Bangladesh and yet
people work not less than 14 hours per day just to survive on less then
a US Dollar a day while being unable to live anywhere but in shanty
homes with no clean water nor sanitations.
Please, help the Third World by boycotting his people exploitation.
Before you buy, find out about the brand's human rights records here:
http://www.business-humanrights.org/Categories/Individualcompanies/
Brought to you by 
www.Margherita-Caminita.org

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I have been in Third World Countries where such "slave" factories exist. 
The effects of Western boycotts have not been to improve factory 
conditions - they have been to close the factories and deprive the 
people of what little opportunity and hope they had.
It is often not a case of a company making a huge profit from such 
endeavours. The added costs of providing electricity, in a country where 
supplies are totally or almost non-existent, water and, let's face it, 
bribes to everyone from the police to the telephone engineers may make 
the decision to set up there, rather than another Third, or even Second 
World Country (with subsidies), very marginal. Third World Countries 
also typically have high inflation, political instability, rampant crime 
and other factors which make them unattractive. The only thing they have 
is "slave" labour - for whom even a little income is the difference 
between life and death, quite literally.
A shanty home with one dollar a day is a dream to someone whose 
alternative employment is searching stinking garbage heaps for anything 
to sell and, yes, anything to eat and alternative housing is a sewage pipe..
Boycotting such companies in favour of those with factories in the 
Western World, with employees having all the protection that goes with 
it, does nothing for the lot of the Third World. Positive investment 
does. "Fair trade" companies exist. Even holiday-makers can help, by 
stepping out of their walled bunker hotels and buying from the local 
market instead.
I respectfully suggest that, before you start making recommendations you 
find out what effects they have. Why not take your next holiday there? 
Or try a while as an aid volunteer in Cite Soleil. And ask the locals 
there how grateful they were for Western Boycotts on their behalf. But 
don't go in the rainy season - when parents have to stand holding their 
children for hours on end as a river of raw sewage turns the whole area 
into a lake. Many had to move there when they lost their dollar a day..
-- 
Sue