Leicester has been in and out of the news a lot this year, repeatedly for human rights violations in the garment factories, but also for the continued spread of Covid-19 (did you know Leicester hasn’t actually come out of lockdown yet?!). And yet both of these facts are intrinsically linked.

So how do we solve a Victorian problem in our modern day society?

From the early 1900s to the end of the 20th Century, Leicester was a global powerhouse for apparel manufacture. But at the end of the 1980s and into the early 90s both the UK and foreign governments gave businesses incentives to move production to “cheaper’ countries, such as China, India and Korea. And we can’t look to address the imbalance of power in the UK apparel sector without first acknowledging how it came to be in the first place; that sourcing is political. How we vote effects how brands source, and unfortunately it’s not as simple as a Brexit vote, which may end up being the final nail in the coffin depending on a myriad of outcomes welded in the hands of Johnson and Gove.

The other way our government have shirked responsibility with this issue comes down to 2 other key factors; our immigration policy (which is only going to get harder for “unskilled” labour, driving up the instances of slave labour as businesses desperately need this labour to keep running, while also exploiting the fact that these workers risk being deported if they blow the whistle) and the austerity cuts we’ve seen since the Tory’s came to power, which has stripped organisations in Leicester with the power to investigate and fine corrupt businesses. Just off the cuff; the closure of many of HMRC’s localised offices has halted investigations into many of the Leicester factories who have been found to be paying less than minimum wage, as well as being run by shadow directors, banned from running companies mainly due to tax infringements (human rights violations don’t actually get you struck off as a director). But that does still weed out some shady folk.

The next problem we face in this pandemic of human rights abuses, is the shareholder first culture levied by big corporations. While all businesses need to make a profit in order to survive and our entire system needs to be backed up by tax paid on that profit. We are seeing businesses pushing higher profit targets onto buyers without investing in any training in order to ensure that human exploitation is not part of that profit making drive. 30 years ago that knowledge would have been there because of the time buyers spent on the factory floor, whereas nowadays they may visit once a year at best and in the future, who knows. And with large parts of their jobs being increasingly consumer focussed, without their employers support and training, it will be impossible to bring that back.

Finally, there is factory auditing. Over the years this has been continually commercialised, with auditing companies financially benefiting from finding problems in the first place. While you might not think that’s a bad thing, it erodes trust on the supplier’s behalf as they are essentially holding a company to ransom and the support given afterwards is lacking in any tangible actions. While much has been done to clean up this area of our sector, more needs to be done.

Ultimately to make a positive change, we need human centric policies set out by our government for the benefit of every working person, those who work with suppliers in the apparel industry need to have a host of resources they can call on to make good buying decisions and auditing companies need to be employed by the whole supply chain to ensure impartiality and effective criteria.

What to do about a problem like Leicester?

Who really knows how to source something anyway?

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