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Business Daily: Are Sweatshops Good?

11/07/2014

Are Sweatshops Good?

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Are Sweatshops Good?

More than a year after the Rana Plaza disaster, what's been done to improve conditions?

A year after Bangladesh suffered the worst industrial accident in modern history, what's been done to improve worker conditions? Is reform itself hurting workers' interests?

It's more than a year since Bangladesh suffered the worst industrial accident in modern history. But apart from an increase in the minimum wage, has anything actually improved in terms of the conditions for Bangladeshi workers? We hear from Philip Jennings, General Secretary of the Uni Global union, on the need for further action, and from the government's commerce minister, Tofail Ahmed, who insists factories are safer. 

Also in the programme, we debate the view, made by Dr Ben Powell, director of the Free Market Institute, that sweatshops are actually a necessary first step towards economic progress in developing economies. Tansy Hoskins a journalist and the author of Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, disagrees. And we get a report from Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, where a renewed fashion for traditional Highland tweed has seen the resurgence of a true cottage industry.

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