Long Read just a matter of choice and a matter of
your profi t margins, essentially. Q
What do you think are the strengths of No Sweat as a company?
A. Where I think we stand out is our focus on trade unions. Our initial focus was to set up a project where we sourced from worker’s cooperatives that were set up by former sweatshop workers. And that was sort of our premise. Finding these kind of factories was very hard.
And then getting into the industry and discovering the practicalities of importing from different countries and the tax rates and stuff like that involved meant that we had to move away from that model. We thought, well, where we’d been supporting trade unions for the last 20 years, workers organise themselves to fi ght for better wages and conditions, so it seemed the most practical solution. Let’s go to the trade unions in different countries around the world, like Bangladesh, you know, the major producers and say, where should we source our t shirts from? What factories have you organised the workers in? We’ll start there. And as the project builds, if we grow into a major player and we saw more than one factory, we can go to other trade unions and ask them. And that builds the idea that trade unions aren’t something bad to be feared and fought against, which is the position in countries like Bangladesh and around the world particularly. And it will change the mindset and say, well, there’s a company that has a signifi cant stake in the market that is demanding workers have independent trade union representation.
Q
How are you ensuring that’s you’re sustainable yourselves?
A. We took a position and moved over to organic very soon and to think within a year or two, once we managed to get a situation where we can buy enough stock to warrant the price, as organics are more expensive than regular cotton. Once we’re in a fi nancial position to do that, we switched over to completely organic. We only use factories where workers have strong trade unions. We only use organic products. This is how the model should be and anyone else not following this can’t really lay the claim to be ethical and sustainable. If you’ve got an ethical line and an unethical line, you’re just perpetuating the problem.
| 54 | July 2023
No Sweat is only using unionised factories, with the aim of creating a new model for the wholesale market – Hasanul Huq Jacky
This t shirt fights sweatshops... – emotive branding from the company – Hasanul Huq Jacky
A closer look at the No Sweat branding – Hasanul Huq Jacky
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
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