Blood, Sweat and Tshirts.

I hate that everyone thinks that it's someone's own fault for being in that situiation! And in India, you can't change whether your are in poverty or not. If you are, you are. End of story. Its so harsh! And Not everyone can be making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. The world isnt that perfect. I feel so sorry for those people.

yeh that reminds me not to buy from big places, try to buy local, although one of the biggest names in Icelandic outdoor clothing 66ºNorth, just moved it's main manufacturing plant to China..doh!
It's hard as there aren't many local places here that you can afford! Everything is imported including most food
I do feel so bad for the people who work in these sick places. It's not just clothes though, it's things like ipods and all the rest of techonology.

If you can't afford to buy clothes anywhere else but from Primark, then go cheaper.

Go to your charity shops. Yeah, someone had to make them in the first place, but your buying of the clothes is in no way paying into or encouraging the sweat shop trade. I rarely buy clothes from 'normal' shops now, and when I do I feel awful about it, so I make sure I go to shops with fair(ish) prices for their clothes- h&m or above.

I also make a lot.

I'd make my own if I had a sewing machine and some where that sold decent enough fabric, and that fabric would have probably been made in India or China anyway. But I hardly ever buy clothes unless I need a new cardi or something and look in charity shops sometimes. It drives me crazy when people just throw stuff out its so easy to recycle paper now a days and usually when we get the bags to fill with clothes from charities its a good reason to empty out the wardrobes.

Yeah I normally buy clothes from charity shops because you're not giving money to them, you're giving it to charity, so it's alright. Making the clothes go to waste isn't going to help.

The problem is, I'm not sure what WOULD help. Boycotting rarely does anything (I've always seen it more as a moral "I can sleep at night if I don't buy from this company" more than actually affecting them)

yeh and I'm a complete hypocrite because Coca Cola factories are terrible and I drink coke products all the time. I don't want to accept that this is the world we live in but it's hard when you can't do much about it apart from your tiny bit, but at least it's a bit.

Boycotting would help. If everybody in Britain stopped using Primark and were freely open about why they weren't doing so, then it would be shut down and a place that offers fair trade, fairly priced clothes would open up in it's place.

Businesses open and shut according to demand, boycotting removes the demand, removes the business.

I try to stay away from Nestle as much as possible. It's just such a big franchise it's almost impossible, just because it doesn't say Nestle on the packaging doesn't necessarily mean it's not part of it. Over a third of our products are Nestle products, I think.

Nestle yeh like Coca Cola they own so many other brands, not even in their own area either. It's pretty scary, that if you do want to boycott, the amount of things you would not be able to use!

I do try to stay away from Nestle and other big products as much as I can, as I have said a million times, most stuff here is imported!
The catering bread they use here in work which I have for my toast is made in England!

i went to a walmart the other day, to get some things for a camping trip. on the loud speakers, an "american" song was on (oh beautiful i think it was, something like that) but on all the labels of anything i looked at in that store was "CHINA". talk about irony. and arent the chinese using that money they get for things we dont necessarily want them doing? and what about the fact we have sosososoooo many recalls of things made in China, mostly childrens toys and baby care items. WTF?!?!?

yeh there was a batch of Barbie accessories that had been painted with lead paint or something!?

I want to stop drinking coke products because it's just bad for my teeth but I do always think about ethical issues but as I said I'm a hypocrite! Also being a vegetarian I should try to be more ethical in other areas because that again makes me a hypocrite, even though not eating meat doesn't stop animals dying etc etc which is a different issue really.

Everything is imported from other places which brings up the other issue of global warming, resources running out etc. Shrimp in Scotland gets sent to I can't remember which country but it gets sent to another country to get packed then back to the UK to be sold!!!! And even though we don't have oranges in this country growing naturally stuff we have growing gets exported to other countries and then we get the same stuff here imported from other countries!!!

Young's Scampi- they fish for it in Scotland, send it off to Thailand to be prepared, sends it off elsewhere still to be boxed, then back to Britain for sail.

oo yeh I couldn't remember! I thought it was thailand though!

Well I know for a fact we box and pack our own fish and prawns here, coz I've done it! haha

Fruit though, that's a totally different matter, the only things we grow here are spuds, tomatoes, cucumber, mushrooms, peppers and cabbage.. there may be more, but not even apples! We just don't have the climate for it. So even if I try to buy organic, it's been shipped from California! doh!

I really enjoyed the show, it's good to see how clothes are actually made and possible to be priced to low. I'd love to go on a show like that and get my sewing skills pushed to the extreme, it'd make me a much better sewer. The thing that annoyed me with the show was that they kept comparing the pay the got in India to the equivalent in British money - yes they only got 90p for a day, but that did cover their rent and food. That kind of money wouldn't go far in the UK, but it would go quite far in India. They should have compared it to how much people in other professions made.

I really hate shopping, so I don't usually shop in highstreet stores anyway - I pick up most of my clothes from charity and vintage shops, ebay, Vivienne Westwood or make them!