Ethical Threads
Ethical Threads is a clothing manufacturer based in the United Kingdom. The company is wholly owned by the Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union Council and the London Region GMB Union. The company was created as a source of ethical non- sweatshop clothing, and all producers follow international conventions of workers rights and will not employ child labour. Ethical Threads' organically grown cotton is supplied by the Vasudha Cotton Project in India to the Oeko-tex standard. The company was boosted in 2002 when the Glastonbury Festival sourced official merchandise from Ethical Threads, who used disabled workers at Remploy for manufacturing. That year, Ethical Threads hosted The Left Field area of the festival. The Glastonbury Festival subsequently banned sweatshop sourced clothing following a campaign by Billy Bragg. A report by the Maquila Solidarity Network {{unreferenced, date=May 2013 The Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN) based in Toronto describes itself as: "A Canadi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and many smaller islands within the British Isles. Northern Ireland shares a land border with the Republic of Ireland; otherwise, the United Kingdom is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. The total area of the United Kingdom is , with an estimated 2020 population of more than 67 million people. The United Kingdom has evolved from a series of annexations, unions and separations of constituent countries over several hundred years. The Treaty of Union between the Kingdom of England (which included Wales, annexed in 1542) and the Kingdom of Scotland in 170 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Battersea And Wandsworth Trades Union Council
Battersea and Wandsworth TUC is a Trades Union Council (also known as a Trades Council) covering the London Borough of Wandsworth in South West London. It is one of the best organised and resourced TUCs in the UK thanks to its trading arm BWTUC (Trading) Ltd which runs the Workers Beer Company and a range of other commercial enterprises to raise money in an ethical way that can then be spent on the activities of the BWTUC. The Trades Union Council owns an organising centre in Earlsfield and employs 3 full-time staff. Its organising and campaigning priorities are determined by the TUC's General Council (composed of delegates from over 50 affiliated Trade Union Branches) and Executive Committee, elected annually by those delegates. Currently BWTUC is engaged in campaigns to recruit and organise for trade unions like the GMB and UNISON throughout South West London and is also working with organisations like The Fairtrade Foundation The Fairtrade Foundation is a charity based in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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GMB Union
The GMB is a general trade union in the United Kingdom which has more than 460,000 members. Its members work in nearly all industrial sectors, in retail, security, schools, distribution, the utilities, social care, the National Health Service (NHS), ambulance service and local government. Structural history GMB originates from a series of mergers, beginning when the National Amalgamated Union of Labour (NAUL), National Union of General Workers (NUGW) and the Municipal Employees Association (MEA) in 1924 joined into a new union, named the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (NUGMW). Although the new union was one of the largest in the country it grew relatively slowly over the following decades; this changed in the 1970s when David Basnett created new sections for staff, and hotel and catering workers, and changed the union's name to the General and Municipal Workers' Union (GMWU) in 1974. In 1982, following a merger with the Amalgamated Society of Boilermakers, Sh ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ethical Consumerism
Ethical consumerism (alternatively called ethical consumption, ethical purchasing, moral purchasing, ethical sourcing, or ethical shopping and also associated with sustainable and green consumerism) is a type of consumer activism based on the concept of dollar voting. People practice it by buying ethically made products that support small-scale manufacturers or local artisans and protect animals and the environment, while boycotting products that exploit children as workers, are tested on animals, or damage the environment. The term "ethical consumer", now used generically, was first popularised by the UK magazine ''Ethical Consumer'', first published in 1989. ''Ethical Consumer'' magazine's key innovation was to produce "ratings tables", inspired by the criteria-based approach of the then-emerging ethical investment movement. ''Ethical Consumers ratings tables awarded companies negative marks (and overall scores, starting in 2005) across a range of ethical and environmental cate ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sweatshop
A sweatshop or sweat factory is a crowded workplace with very poor, socially unacceptable or illegal working conditions. Some illegal working conditions include poor ventilation, little to no breaks, inadequate work space, insufficient lighting, or uncomfortably/dangerously high or low temperatures. The work may be difficult, tiresome, dangerous, climatically challenging or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with unfair wages, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. Women make up 85 to 90% of sweatshop workers and may be forced by employers to take birth control and routine pregnancy tests to avoid supporting maternity leave or providing health benefits. The Fair Labor Association's "2006 Annual Public Report" inspected factories for FLA compliance in 18 countries including Bangladesh, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Malaysia, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, China, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Indonesia, Brazil, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Labor Rights
Labor rights or workers' rights are both legal rights and human rights relating to labor relations between workers and employers. These rights are codified in national and international labor and employment law. In general, these rights influence working conditions in relations of employment. One of the most prominent is the right to freedom of association, otherwise known as the right to organize. Workers organized in trade unions exercise the right to collective bargaining to improve working conditions. Labor background Throughout history, workers claiming some sort of right have attempted to pursue their interests. During the Middle Ages, the Peasants' Revolt in England expressed demand for better wages and working conditions. One of the leaders of the revolt, John Ball famously argued that people were born equal saying, "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" Laborers often appealed to traditional rights. For instance, English peasants fought against ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Child Labour
Child labour refers to the exploitation of children through any form of work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and is mentally, physically, socially and morally harmful. Such exploitation is prohibited by legislation worldwide, although these laws do not consider all work by children as child labour; exceptions include work by child artists, family duties, supervised training, and some forms of work undertaken by Amish children, as well as by indigenous children in the Americas. Child labour has existed to varying extents throughout history. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, many children aged 5–14 from poorer families worked in Western nations and their colonies alike. These children mainly worked in agriculture, home-based assembly operations, factories, mining, and services such as news boys – some worked night shifts lasting 12 hours. With the rise of household income, availability of scho ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar, and Indonesia. Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago., "Y-Chromosome and Mt-DNA data support the colonization of South Asia by modern humans originating in Africa. ... Coalescence dates for most non-European populations average to between 73–55 ka.", "Modern human beings—''Homo sapiens''—originated in Africa. Then, int ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Glastonbury Festival
Glastonbury Festival (formally Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts and known colloquially as Glasto) is a five-day festival of contemporary performing arts that takes place in Pilton, Somerset, England. In addition to contemporary music, the festival hosts dance, comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, and other arts. Leading pop and rock artists have headlined, alongside thousands of others appearing on smaller stages and performance areas. Films and albums have been recorded at the festival, and it receives extensive television and newspaper coverage. Glastonbury is attended by around 200,000 people, thus requiring extensive security, transport, water, and electricity-supply infrastructure. While the number of attendees is sometimes swollen by gatecrashers, a record of 300,000 people was set at the 1994 festival, headlined by the Levellers who performed on The Pyramid Stage. Most festival staff are volunteers, helping the festival to raise millions of pounds for ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Remploy
Remploy is an organisation in the United Kingdom which provides employment placement services for disabled people. It is a major welfare-to-work provider, delivering a range of contracts and employment programmes, for people with substantial barriers to work. Between 2009 and 2014, it found 100,000 jobs for disabled people. Historically, it also directly employed disabled people in a number of factories owned by Remploy itself and subsidised by the UK government, though these were phased out at the start of the 21st century. History Enterprise business and factories Remploy was originally established under the terms of the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944, to directly employ disabled persons in specialised factories. It opened its first factory in Bridgend, Wales, in 1946. Over the following decades it established a network of 83 factories across the UK making a wide variety of products. These were organised into a number of sub-businesses, such as Remploy e-cycle, which d ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Left Field
The Left Field is a travelling Stage (theatre), stage and bar (establishment), bar which forms part of several List of festivals in the United Kingdom, British festivals. The event is organised by Geoff Martin, organiser of the Battersea and Wandsworth TUC, and sponsored by Cooperative Insurance, the GMB union, the Amicus (trade union), Amicus union, Clause IV, Ethical Threads and the Workers Beer Company. The Left Field was first designed to tackle apathy and promote left-wing politics and trade unionism in young festival goers at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000. It was a regular fixture at Guilfest and Homelands (festival), Homelands. It has and Glastonbury festivals, and in 2005 at the Edinburgh Fringe. The Left Field has featured left-wing musicians, such as Billy Bragg and Asian Dub Foundation, political comedians such as Mark Thomas and commentators including Tony Benn, with a number of speeches and debates taking place at each festival. The Left Field also runs many film ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |