super-markets

Jivaj, who is from West Bengal and looks around 12, told The Observer that some of the boys in the sweatshop had been badly beaten. 'Our hours are hard and violence is used against us if we don't work hard enough. This is a big order for abroad, they keep telling us that.

'Last week, we spent four days working from dawn until about one o'clock in the morning the following day. I was so tired I felt sick,' he whispers, tears streaming down his face. 'If any of us cried we were hit with a rubber pipe. Some of the boys had oily cloths stuffed in our mouths as punishment.'

I was bought from my parents' village in [the northern state of] Bihar and taken to New Delhi by train,' he says. 'The men came looking for us in July. They had loudspeakers in the back of a car and told my parents that, if they sent me to work in the city, they won't have to work in the farms. My father was paid a fee for me and I was brought down with 40 other children. The journey took 30 hours and we weren't fed. I've been told I have to work off the fee the owner paid for me so I can go home, but I am working for free. I am a shaagird [a pupil]. The supervisor has told me because I am learning I don't get paid. It has been like this for four months.

In Mauritius... the Sunday Times reported that migrant workers in factories supplying UK brands earn as little as 22p to 40p per hour, when the average local wage is 55p. One of them had supplied Sir Philip Green’s Topshop for the past ten years. “When I go to bed at the end of the day,” one woman told the paper, “I lay down and weep.” Another explained the conditions in which they work:

'We were put in dormitories – approximately 20ft-30ft, 40-50 workers huddled together in this room. There was no space to move around. For the 985 employees there were only 10 toilets and at least three of them did not work at any time. More often there was no water in the toilets. The food was so bad we could not consume it.'

Philip Green is the owner of Topshop, Bhs, and a host of other high street brand names. Two years ago, he claimed a £1.2 billion dividend, enough to double the salaries of Cambodia’s entire garment workforce for 8 years. He paid Kate Moss a reported £3 million pounds to put her name to a Topshop line of clothing: a Mauritian worker in a factory that supplies Green’s Arcadia group would have to work for almost 4,000 years to earn that much.

19 years have passed [since the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but] ExxonMobil still refuses to pay all of the court-ordered, $2.5 billion in damages...

This is the same company that reported the largest annual profit in U.S. history in 2006, with $39.5 billion. It followed up 2006, by besting its record of the previous year by reporting $40.61 billion in profit for 2007. And as the Washington Post noted, ExxonMobil's 2006 "revenue of $377.6 billion exceeded the gross domestic product of all but 25 countries."

"Gap may be one of the best-known fashion brands with a public commitment to social responsibility, but the employment of bonded child slaves as young as 10 in India's illegal sweatshops tells a different story. The reality is that most major retail firms are in the same game, cutting costs and not considering the consequences. They should know by now what outsourcing to India means.

It is an impossible task to track down all of these terrible sweatshops, particularly in the garment industry when you need little more than a basement or an attic crammed with small children to make a healthy profit. Some owners even hide the children in sacks and in carefully concealed mezzanine floors designed to dodge such raids."

NB: Glenn Murphy, the CEO of Gap pays himself $1.5 billion a year.