In 2003, we asked you to send a campaign postcard to the Chief Executive of one of our target high-street stores, asking them to join the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI). More than 5,000 of you did just that so now we’ve got a new way for you to campaign!
Instead of going straight to the top, we want you to hand in our very own Lift the Label customer comment campaign card to the manager of one of the target stores. In turn, they need to contact their Chief Executive in order to answer some questions. Read on to get involved!
Tearfund is working with Labour Behind the Label to call on major UK clothes retailers to see it as their responsibility that all clothes sold in their shops are produced under decent conditions. The best way for them to do this is by joining the Ethical Trade Initiative.
We want YOU to use your consumer power to ask retailers to make positive choices and ensure that workers are treated fairly.
Click here for a downloadable version of the customer comment campaign card (PDF, 422K).
Why not download a few copies to hand out over the counter when you hit the high street, and to give out to others so they can take action? A major retailer told the Ethical Trading
Initiative that if they received just ten concerns about an issue from their customers, they would want to do something to address it. The more we raise our concerns about the pay,
conditions and rights of garment workers when we go shopping, the more likely it is that companies will take action.
Why take action?
Every product we buy tells the story of a person who has hopes, dreams and fears just like us. By buying their products we become part of their story. The invisible fingerprints of real people are on our clothes, not just the marks of machines. Their struggles matter to God, and he wants them to matter to us. He knows the names of the 250 million children who work as child labourers instead of going to school. He knows the 200 garment workers in Bangladesh who died in factory fires over the last decade.
He knows the injustice felt by the woman who only gets paid 25p for making a jacket which sells for £50 on the UK high street. These are our global neighbours. They are lying on the global roadside.
Busy people like you and I can choose to walk on by or stop, take notice and do something to help. God calls us to love these neighbours as we love ourselves. Proverbs 31 tells us how. We are to see our neighbour’s problem as our problem.
‘Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves... defend the rights of the poor and needy’ (Proverbs 31 v8-9).
Campaigning is needed - on the high street, not just on Downing Street!
UK shoppers spend £30 billion a year on clothes! This means clothes companies listen when shoppers have something to say. When we show concern that most of our money ends up in the hands of companies selling clothes, and not the hands of those who make them, shops listen.
Lift the Label is about asking who really pays the price when we shop. It’s about speaking up for workers who pay with their time, their energy, their stress levels, their physical condition, their struggle to make ends meet, their crushed hopes.