CN Chinese factory worker writes allegations of forced labour in a Tesco card - Working retail at Christmas in the West isn't much better.

www.bbc.co.uk

Tesco halts production at Chinese factory over alleged 'forced' labour

The six-year-old found a hand-written message from Chinese prisoners in a box of Christmas cards.
www.bbc.co.uk

Tesco has suspended production at a factory in China following allegations forced prison labour was used to pack charity Christmas cards.

It comes after the Sunday Times reported a six-year-old girl from south London found a message from Shanghai prisoners hidden in a box of cards.

"Please help us and notify human rights organisation," the message said.

Tesco said it was "shocked" by the report, adding: "We would never allow prison labour in our supply chain."

The supermarket said it would de-list the supplier of the cards, Zheijiang Yunguang Printing, if it was found to have used prison labour.

According to the Sunday Times, Florence Widdicombe opened a £1.50 box of Tesco cards to find that one of them - featuring a kitten with a Santa hat - had already been written in.

In block capitals, it said: "We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu prison China. Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation."

A Tesco spokeswoman said: "We were shocked by these allegations and immediately halted production at the factory where these cards are produced and launched an investigation."

The supermarket said it has a "comprehensive auditing system" to ensure suppliers are not exploiting forced labour.

The factory in question was checked only last month and no evidence of it breaking the ban on prison labour was found, it said.

Sales of charity Christmas cards at the company's supermarkets raise £300,000 a year for the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK.

The retailer has not received any other complaints from customers about messages inside Christmas cards.

A foreign inmate dries clothes at Shanghai Qingpu prison in 2006
Image copyrightCHINA PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGESImage captionA foreign inmate dries clothes at Shanghai Qingpu prison in 2006
The message in the card urged the recipient to contact Peter Humphrey, a journalist who was formerly imprisoned at Qingpu on what he described as "bogus charges that were never heard in court".

After the Widdicombe family sent him a message via Linkedin, Mr Humphrey said he then contacted ex-prisoners who confirmed inmates had been forced into mundane assembly and packaging tasks.

Mr Humphrey - the author of the Sunday Times story - also said that censorship in the prison had increased, cutting off his usual methods of contacting prisoners he had met before his release in 2015.

"They resorted to the Qingpu equivalent of a message in a bottle, scribbled on a Tesco Christmas card," he said.

It is not the first time that prisoners in China have reportedly smuggled out messages in products they have been forced to make for Western markets.

In 2012, Julie Keith from Portland, Oregon, discovered an account of torture and persecution by a prisoner who said he was forced to manufacture the Halloween decorations she had purchased.

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Reports that Father Christmas has outsourced his North Pole workshop to China have continued to be unconfirmed.
 
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This happened a few years ago at a K Mart here in the states.

www.businessinsider.com

Chilling Letter From Chinese Factory Worker Found In Kmart Halloween Decorations

www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com

Chilling Letter From Chinese Factory Worker Found In Kmart Halloween Decorations

The New York Times has identified the man who wrote a chilling letter describing Chinese factory conditions that was found in a box of Halloween decorations from Kmart.

The man, identified only as Mr. Zhang to protect his identity, told the Times that he was imprisoned in a labor camp where "inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards."

The labor camps are full of petty criminals or people who rebel against the country's religion, Mr. Zhang said. He said he wrote 20 letters over the course of two years.

One was discovered by Julie Keith of Oregon, who had bought the decorations over a year ago but decided to use them to decorate for her daughter's birthday party last October.

Inside the box, she found a plea for help supposedly written by a Chinese factory worker in Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang, The Oregonian reported at the time.

Here's an excerpt from the letter, grammatical mistakes included:

"If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persecution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.
People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month).
People who work here, suffer punishment 1-3 years averagely, but without Court Sentence (unlaw punishment). Many of them are Falun Gong practitioners, who are totally innocent people only because they have different believe to CCPG. They often suffer more punishment than others."

Ten yuan is equivalent to $1.61.

Keith handed over the letter to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which opened an investigation into the matter.

Sears Holdings, the owner of Kmart, told The New York Times that an internal investigation prompted by the letter found "no violations of company rules that bar the use of forced labor."

For her part, Keith said she has nearly stopped buying products manufactured in China.
 
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Overly Serious said:
Don't see anything in this that qualifies as "blatant horseshit". It's not new for Chinese prisoners to have entered SOS messages into the products they are forced to make and at least one of these seems pretty substantially corroborated (the Halloween one in the OP's link). Unless you consider the idea of someone doing this wildly improbable then all the rest follows pretty easily - somebody is going to open the box and find it. And I know I personally wouldn't just throw it away and forget about it so I don't know why I should assume everybody else would. The journalist asked for by name served time in a Chinese prison so it's not like that would be unlikely either. Of course you'd put the name of the Western journalist who was on your cell block on there. Anything to increase the chance it might get attention.
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Supposedly Volkswagon has a nice shiny new Chinese factory, located right in the middle of the suspected Uighar Concentration Camps. Volkswagon claims it is "economical"
 
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Hey I hate journalists as much as the next guy but like Freud said, sometimes a chink slave factory is just a chink slave factory.
 
I'm reminded of the urban legend where a family receives a type-written letter from a loved one who was captured by <insert enemy combatant nation here> during WW2, they think it's rather curious since that person couldn't type as far as anyone knew. They give the postcard or letter and envelope to the POW's little brother, as he is a philologist, and when he steams the stamp off, there's a scrawled message under the sticking point that says GOD HELP ME THEY CUT OFF MY HANDS
 
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Thank Fuck For Evil Otto said:
The claims seem to have substance:

qz.com

Chinese prisoners allegedly made products for H&M and C&A

Released from a Chinese prison, a British investigator says he saw prisoners laboring for international brands that ban such work in their supply chain.
qz.com qz.com

Subscribe to read | Financial Times

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication
www.ft.com www.ft.com
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Western companies have elaborate ways to keep their eyes closed and Chinese play along very well. The last documentary I saw was about Chinese factories using open pit sandblasting to soften up jeans for major brands and as usual, major brand play "we are shocked" face and a promise of investigation which never finds shit.

What matters is not little chinese people, it's money and image that companies care, but they don't, they just don't want to be exposed to be complicit.
 
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Кот Бегемот said:
Western companies have elaborate ways to keep their eyes closed and Chinese play along very well. The last documentary I saw was about Chinese factories using open pit sandblasting to soften up jeans for major brands and as usual, major brand play "we are shocked" face and a promise of investigation which never finds shit.

What matters is not little chinese people, it's money and image that companies care, but they don't, they just don't want to be exposed to be complicit.
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Reminds me of the documentary I watched a few years ago called 'mardis gras: made in china' that documents a factory in china that produces beads and other mardis gras related items. The place looked like a concentration camp and had toxic sludge from the machines dripping out onto the floor. The conditions were horrific and the best part? One of the main guys running the place was some older white american guy who said - and i'm dead serious about this - 'its not based on a system that would work in the US, our people would never accept anything like it, but its what they know and it works for them' while smiling sitting in a big chair in his office. I highly recommend looking it up, it was a pretty interesting look into what is supposedly a 'good' factory to work in (and if thats what they consider good I don't even want to think about what the actual prison labor looks like)

That said, at least the chinese and american companies finally found a use for that old 'don't ask don't tell policy' that is actually practical
 
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Overly Serious said:
Don't see anything in this that qualifies as "blatant horseshit". It's not new for Chinese prisoners to have entered SOS messages into the products they are forced to make and at least one of these seems pretty substantially corroborated (the Halloween one in the OP's link). Unless you consider the idea of someone doing this wildly improbable then all the rest follows pretty easily - somebody is going to open the box and find it. And I know I personally wouldn't just throw it away and forget about it so I don't know why I should assume everybody else would. The journalist asked for by name served time in a Chinese prison so it's not like that would be unlikely either. Of course you'd put the name of the Western journalist who was on your cell block on there. Anything to increase the chance it might get attention.
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Sometime ago a similar message was found in a newly purchased purse. I can't remember what store the item came from or if it was ordered from some place. But I remember reading the story years ago.

This is one of the effects of outsourcing manufacturing to China. They don't care about workers rights or humane treatment. There's no Chinese Norma Rae. Just prison labor and poor workers crammed into dormatories.
 
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this period in time will be known as colonialism 2.0 and I'm sure future libtards will strive for more reporushns ... actually they already do.

Besides China, there are pretty much all the third world shitholes that are willing to sell their environment and people's lives for a few shekels that go to the top people in power and connected dudes. Asia is well known to poison the crap out of their land with textiles mfgs, India for reprocessing toxic electronic shit and Africa ... still same old.

I remember that when in the 1930's Stalin engineered Holodomor and millions of Ukrainians were starving, Soviet Union was activelly selling assload of grain abroad to get cash. It was a known fact for anyone who cared. Same deal with Nazi concentration camps which started long before 1939. In fact a lot of them were based on Soviet model which used them a lot. If you overlay the map of Stalin's Gulag camps with major production centers, they are identical. Nothing new.
 
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WonderWino said:
Reminds me of the documentary I watched a few years ago called 'mardis gras: made in china' that documents a factory in china that produces beads and other mardis gras related items. The place looked like a concentration camp and had toxic sludge from the machines dripping out onto the floor. The conditions were horrific and the best part? One of the main guys running the place was some older white american guy who said - and i'm dead serious about this - 'its not based on a system that would work in the US, our people would never accept anything like it, but its what they know and it works for them' while smiling sitting in a big chair in his office. I highly recommend looking it up, it was a pretty interesting look into what is supposedly a 'good' factory to work in (and if thats what they consider good I don't even want to think about what the actual prison labor looks like)

That said, at least the chinese and american companies finally found a use for that old 'don't ask don't tell policy' that is actually practical
Click to expand...
I work with a guy who went to China to set up some manufacturing equipment and power distribution. He found out how much the Chinese cheap out on everything when he happened to lean against a panelboard and touched a window to open it because there was no air conditioning installed in the building yet. He woke up, on the ground, because the building wasn't built with any kind of earth ground. The panel board neutral was connected to the skin of the unit, with no other grounds, and when he touched the metal frame of the window he shorted it to ground.

He said that discovery explained a lot of the problems they'd been having doing the setup.
 
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