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

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."

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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.

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.

 

[Shadfan666xxx000]

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.

Especially for the chinese actually. Going all the way back to the Qin and Han dynasties, the main source of labor for their engineering programs were malnourished prisoners who were often gelded and beaten as they died making them. It was literally like in Civ 4 where if you had the slavery civic, then you could rush production with pop sacrifice.

 

[AltisticRight]

Fake or otherwise, I've seen Chinese Christmas factories and the working conditions are horrid.

And yes, I saw that on Chinese "CCTV", the state news outlet. Might seem surprising since some actually believe in that falungong organ trash. There's even a show called "每週質量報告" on Chinese state media that focuses on exposing shitty factory/food practices through various autistic espionage methods, such as getting a spy with a small camera infiltrate as a worker.

Spoiler: Autistic milk powder rant

Speaking of horrible practices, they reported heavily on the dyed duck eggs (蘇丹紅一號) and San Lu Milk Powder Scandal case. This caused basically mainland Chinese everywhere to only get imported milk powder, even causing shortages in places such as Australia since merchants mass purchase when there's a promotion.

Woolworths imposes restrictions on the purchase of milk powders. Some of these disgusting cunts are buying so much milk powder, local babies aren't getting fed. There's people who steal milk powder to export into mainland China. This isn't just an Australian phenomenon, it happens in Singapore, China, and I'm sure just about everywhere. I guess here's proof that it's not just Chinese, but I'm willing to bet that ~99% of Chinese thieves will export it to mainland China. All this is due to some soulless greedy slants willing to fuck up the future of kids for a little more profit. People like this should be hung.

Have any of you ever inhaled glitter, or get it in your eyes? Happened to me once as a kid (both), fuck it was painful. These factories are literally a "Glitter" chamber.

Find the photo yourself, this is the heavily censored shitty chink search engine.

Back to the story, I think it's really just another war on Christmas narrative. Does anyone (besides vegans unironically) bring up the brutality of Kosher slaughter during Jewish holidays or Halal slaughter during Ramadan? Give me a break, 6-year-old lol, once again western media is using kids.

Celebrating Christmas does not mean endorsing factory slavery. Maybe stop supporting these cheap Christmas goods or get them from places other than shitty dollar stores.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

If the Chinese are so upset about working conditions in their own country, maybe they should fix their own country instead of crying to Americans about how bad their life is.

There is 1.4 billion of them. Even if only 10% of the country revolted, the resulting militia would be larger then all the troops and civilians that died in the entirety of WWI and WWII combined.