Chinese SOS Note Found in Primark Trousers
Erika Villanueva | | Jun 27, 2014 05:44 AM EDT |
Northern Ireland Primark customer was in for a shock when she found a chilling Chinese SOS note in one of the pockets of her camouflage trousers written by an alleged victim of slave labor.
Karen Wisinska, a resident of Fermanagh County in Northern Ireland, claims that she found the note when she retrieved the clothing she bought in Belfast in June 2011 while packing for a holiday last week.
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Wisinska found the note wrapped around a prison identification card and later got a rough translation of the message: "We work 15 hours every day and eat food that wouldn't be even be fed to pigs and dogs. We're [forced to] work like oxen."
The writer claims to be a prisoner in the Xiang Nan prison in Hubei province and goes on to appeal to the international community to condemn the Chinese government for the violation of the prisoners' human rights.
Troubled by what she found, she then sought help from Amnesty International, an organization that has documented the use of forced labor in Chinese detention facilities in the past.
"I was shocked to find this note and card inside the trousers from Primark and even more shocked to discover that it appears to have been made under slave labor conditions in a Chinese prison," she told Amnesty.
In the past, the British-owned Irish clothing retailer Primark has been strongly criticized for using Far East sweatshops that employ what can be regarded as slave labor in the West.
Aside from this, two more similar incidents surfaced on Wales. On two separate occasions, shoppers allegedly found pleas sewn into labels of dresses purchased from the same Primark store in Swansea with one stating "Forced to work exhausting hours" and the other read "degrading sweatshop conditions".
However, Primark has strongly denied purchasing clothing made in forced labor camps or prisons in China and has started conducting an investigation of their own.
"Nine inspections of the supplier have been carried out by Primark's ethical standards team since 2009. To be clear, no prison or other forced labor of any kind was found during these inspections," says Primark.
TagsPrimark, slave labor, force labor, Human Rights, Amnesty International, Xiang Nan Prison, SOS note
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