The Case of "Primark"

Is Primark really an unethical company or just a victim of their own partners?

There have been several scandals of using child labour in production facilities of Primark suppliers in India during the past years but the company's image was never strongly affected. They survived every scandal without losing customers and indeed set in to the Ethical Trading Initiative. This organisation fights for the human rights of employees all around the world and Primark as a textile retailer could only join ETI through promising and proving their ethical responsibility.

In 2009 Primark had to face allegations and public discussions again during the UK 'sweatshop' scandal. Some reporters of The Guardian and BBC smuggled an undercover journalist into TNS Knitwear, one of Primark's suppliers located in Manchester.

The working conditions at TNS Knitwear were absolutely inhuman and illegal. People were working there 12 hours a day 7 days in a week for half of the minimum wage (3£ per hour). Some of them had no working permits while others even didn't have a visa and also the health and safety standards set by the british government weren't followed. The journalist had no problems to get a job there and made some films with a hidden camera.  
Primark strained their own internal investigations and affirmed their innocence. The company had to remove all ETI certificates because the requirements for ethical behaviour was ment for all suppliers and subcontractors of the Primark group. Even if Primark wasn't aware of the ongoing abuse of human beings at TNS Knitwear, the group's management couldn't put all the blame on TNS as easily as they did. 
Regarding the company history facing child labour among their indian suppliers Primark was obligated to supervise and controll all their partners - on the one side to make sure that ETI rules were hold and on the other side to obviously prove their social responsibility... and not only promise it!
Maybe Primark wasn't to blame for people working at TNS in such bad conditions, but still Primark was to blame for not learning from former incidents which means the company itself was to blame for not reacting.

What is social responsibility?

Social responsibility in general can be divided in 2 parts: Human Responsibility and Environmental Responsibility. The best known examples are not using child labour, adapting to various health standards in the working environment, reducing emissions and keeping up to the ecological footprint.

All the above mentioned social behaviours can be transferred on the textile and clothing industry.
Child labour still is a very big issue in this branch, because a lot of companies produce their goods in developing countries and there often aren’t enough official inspections and supervision institutions and if there are, they probably are corrupt. Health standards are often neglected because of shortage of money or insufficient observation. These standards are often disregarded from the company’s management, but on the other hand not asked for by their employees, because they either don’t know what their rights are, or they’re threatened by losing their job and as a consequence often their livelihood.
The ecological footprint is a measure to the extent of human damage to the ecosystems of our planet. It focuses on the natural ability to regenerate and the amount of biologically productive land and sea that is necessary to nourish the actual population. However the human race has been living beyond its means over the last years. The ecological footprint shows how much food we need on the one hand but also how much damage we cause with industrial and chemical waste (often produced by the textile industry). 

It is important to keep the ecological footprint at a minimum, because we are not only destroying and exploiting our actual environment, but we damage it for all the following generations. 

Can this be real?

No matter if it is a Primark, H&M, Zara, Topshop or Walmart shop opening...

No matter if the shop was in Europa, Asia or the US... 

No matter if they had to wait for hours...

No matter if the weather was horrible...

No matter if they behaved ruthless...

No matter if they were hurting somebody... 
                                                                                 ...people reacted the same...

Think about it...

Have you ever seen stores filled with stands like this? 
          - I'm sure you have.

But have you ever wondered why clothes can be offered so cheap? 

          - I'm sure you don't have.

My motivation for this blog

First of all, I’d like to introduce myself a little bit. I am a 22 year old student from Germany doing a semester abroad at Griffith College in Dublin. I’m doing a Bachelor’s degree in International Business and my main subjects are Human Resource Management and Marketing.

After High School I decided to do an internship in a fashion company as I have been always interested in this. Not only that I’m passionate about styling and fashion as a way to define a personality or lifestyle, but also because my father owns a textile intermediary agency in Germany, that I’d love to work for one day. So I applied for internships and did my first one in Switzerland in the Design and Product Development Headquarters of Hugo Boss. My second working experience was right after finishing with HB in Barcelona with Prominent Apparel Spain, a design office working for the Inditex Group (one of the world’s largest textile corporations which owns Zara, Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius, Pull&Bear, Induyco among others).

During my internships I got in touch with social aspects of my passion for the first time. I never thought about this before and it took me some time to reflect all the new facts and opinions so that I could make my own point of view. I will try to give people with less insight information an overall view about this topic and I hope you will enjoy reading my thoughts and that you can make up your minds.