HOW LOW CAN HE GO?
Workers paid pitiful 30 PENCE an hour to make £10 T-shirts ...that fund Corbyn campaign
T-SHIRTS sold to raise money for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour leadership campaign are being made by poverty-stricken workers earning just 30p an hour, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The machinists in Bangladesh toil for up to ten hours a day to make the garments, which are believed to have raised thousands of pounds for the Labour leader’s fighting fund. Corbyn has previously attacked the pay and working conditions faced by clothes labourers in Bangladesh and urged consumers to think twice about buying products made in the impoverished country.
Yet a Mail on Sunday investigation has discovered that Momentum – the Left-wing organisation
central to Corbyn’s leadership campaign – has bought hundreds of the T-shirts, some emblazoned with the politician’s name in superhero-style lettering, to sell here for £10 each.
One Bangladeshi factory worker Abdul, 35, said last night: ‘I feel angry that a politician is using Tshirts created with our back-breaking work to make a statement about workers’ rights when he clearly doesn’t care about our rights at all.’
Last night Momentum cancelled its contract with the British supplier of the T-shirts and promised to ‘rigorously’ check the sourcing of its merchandise in the future.
However, questions have been raised as to why the pressure group did not look more closely at where the garments were being made.
If they had, they would have discovered they have been manufactured in factories owned by Gildan – the same Canadian clothing firm that last year was revealed by this newspaper to have paid factory workers in Nicaragua and Haiti as little as 49p an hour to make the official ‘Team Corbyn’ T-shirts for his first Labour leadership bid.
In 2014, we also told how hypocritical Labour politicians including Ed Miliband and Harriet Harman wore ‘feminist’ designer T-shirts made in ‘sweatshop’ factories in Mauritius by women paid just 62p an hour.
Tory MP Stuart Andrew said last night: ‘This exposes the hypocrisy of Jeremy Corbyn’s hard-Left supporters.
‘The working conditions are abominable’
It’s no good spouting forth about protecting low-paid workers if your own supporters are effectively employing them.’
The basic salary at the Gildan factory in Baipayl, near Dhaka, is around £63 a month – well below the country’s average wage of £93. Campaigners told us the employees were treated like ‘slave labour’ and paid around half of what they need to meet their basic living costs.
Employees live in shanty towns made of corrugated iron sheets by a polluted river where several family members sleep together in cramped tiny rooms.
One 20-year-old woman we interviewed had worked at the factory since she was 13 – although she said it no longer employs under-18s. Another told how she is banned from toilet breaks, something the company denies, while a third employee said she had developed asthma caused by dust from the cotton.
Others claimed they can barely walk after being pressurised to meet exhausting targets and work overtime to supplement their meagre basic salary.
Many are forced to borrow money from family and friends to survive, and can only afford to live off a diet of rice and vegetables.
After being stitched and packed in Baipayl, the T-shirts are shipped abroad to a company called 3rd Rail, based in Bermondsey, South London, who supply Momentum. Garment production in Bangladesh is often criticised by human rights groups. In 2013, 1,130 people – mostly garment workers – were killed when the