Khmers work at their machines in a garment factory near Kampong Cham, Cambodia. John Brown/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
In June 2014, The Guardian ran a story about how slave labour is used in Thailand to catch the prawns sold on UK and US high streets. The previous year it reported how child labour is employed in Apple’s factories across China. In April 2013, the collapse of the 8-story Rana Plaza in greater Dhaka, Bangladesh, killed 1,129 people, many of whom were women garment workers. These cases of forced, child and extremely dangerous labour are part and parcel of contemporary global capitalism.
Global supply chains are frequently portrayed as generating win-win situations, not only creating new profit opportunities for multinational firms and delivering cheap goods to northern workers, but also creating employment and reducing poverty in the Global South. For example, Jeffrey Sachs, former director of the United Nations Millennium Project, argued in The End of Poverty: How We Can Make it Happen in our Lifetime, that the proliferation of sweatshops across the Global South should be welcomed because “sweatshops are the first rung on the ladder out of extreme poverty”.
