SUPER-markets

'The wages I get are not enough to cover the cost of food, house rent and medicine,' said Mohua in a factory supplying Asda and Tesco. Her colleague Humayun said, 'with my earnings it is difficult to meet living costs.'

Mohua and Humayun are amongst the better-paid sewing maching operators who earn more than average - in the region of £16 per month. Yet even this equates to just 5p an hour over the 80-hour week they regularly have to work.

• According to the Guardian, the eight directors who run Tesco earned £26m between them in 2003-2004.
• The eight non-executive directors get paid between £44,000 and £72,000 a year for turning up to a few meetings.
• Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, was paid £4.3m in cash and long-term incentives.
• In the words of Boonyoong Vimuttayon, a Bangkok grocery store owner whose sales have declined by more than half since a Tesco Lotus store opened on his street four years ago:

  'The foreigners get richer and richer, while we get poorer all the time.'

See this page for more nuggets on the super-ways of getting super-rich by paying workers super-small salaries (and yourself a little bit more).