Stitched up

Forget the unnaturally skinny models you saw at London Fashion Week last month. And forget the teenage girls who starve themselves to look like them. The real fashion victims are workers in poor countries making cut-price versions of catwalk clothes for retailers in Britain.

A report by the charity War On Want, issued in December 2006, found that employees at clothing suppliers in Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, were regularly working 80 hours each week for 5p an hour, in "potential death-trap factories" where emergency exits were often locked. The clothes they were making were destined for the aisles of Asda, Tesco and Primark.

 http://www.director.co.uk/MAGAZINE/2007/3%20Mar/ethical_trading_60_8.html