Does Made in Europe rhyme with better working conditions?
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The “Europe’s Sweatshops” report describes the serious abuses that exist in the big international fashion brands' supply chains in Eastern and South-eastern Europe. The CCC interviewed over a hundred workers in the shoe and garment factories in Hungary, Serbia and the Ukraine. The results disclosed some worrying facts: the staff are obliged to work unacceptably hard on a daily basis to meet the production quotas that are set. In spite of being obliged to work many hours of overtime, the factory workers barely earn the legal minimum wage.
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The report “A mere pittance – clothes production in Eastern Europe and Turkey” shows that in nine countries of Eastern Europe and Turkey, the seamstresses are living well below the poverty line. And this is a generalised observation: even the high-end fashion houses are not paying more than a pittance. The report “Labour on a Shoestring 2016” testifies to similar abuses in the European shoe industry.
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Italian garment manufacturing – Chinese-style: After having delocalised their production in the 1990s to make the most of the low salaries and optimise their productivity, many textile companies returned to Italy – and although it did create jobs, it also created deplorable working conditions and excessively low wages. Sweatshops proliferated.