Bra firm hit caught in Burmese row

EMINE SANER AND ADAM NATHAN

ANTI-GLOBALISATION protesters have drawn first blood in their campaign to force the bra-maker Triumph International to sever its links with Burma.
The leading lingerie brand has become the latest high- street fashion label to be targeted by the campaigners and now faces an international boycott of its products if the activists are successful.

The planned boycott follows similar protests against other multinational clothes companies, such as Gap, Levi Strauss, Reebok and Nike, all of which have been accused of exploiting Third World workers.

The protesters are objecting to Triumph’s use of a factory in Burma, a country run by a military junta notorious for human rights abuses and low wages.

Last week they claimed their first significant victory in the battle for ethical underwear when the Norwegian women’s skiing team pulled out of a lucrative sponsorship deal with Triumph.

The team has rejected the company’s sponsorship for next year’s Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, and will no longer display its crown logo on clothing.

Several British stores, including Bhs, River Island and the Arcadia group, whose outlets include Burton and Topshop, have also stopped buying any products made in Burma as a result of the campaign.

Underwear made by Triumph has been publicised by Kelly Brook, the former Big Breakfast presenter, and Nell McAndrew, the model. It now faces a series of protests in the new year outside high-street stores that sell its bras.

As part of the campaign, posters have urged women everywhere to: “Support breasts, not dictators.” The campaign has been backed up by a dramatic image of a woman wearing a barbed wire bra.

Last week Triumph received thousands of e-mails from petitioners calling for the company to withdraw from Burma. But David Hornbuckle, director and general manager of Triumph International, said the company would not pull out.

“Triumph rejects closing down its manufacturing operation in Burma,” said Hornbuckle. “We do not want to and we cannot take the responsibility of laying off 1,000 employees for purely political motivations — especially taking into account the consequences for their families.”

But the protesters are not willing to back down. Yvette Mahon, director of Burma Campaign UK, the British wing of the protest group, last week urged Triumph to “cut their losses and get out of Burma now, or choose further humiliation and embarrassment”.

Triumph, whose recent British television campaign featured a computer-generated supermodel dancing in her underwear, set up a company in Burma in 1996. Its plant on a military-owned industrial estate north of Rangoon began exporting underwear to Europe, including Britain, the following year.

The company, based in Switzerland, has 30,000 employees and a turnover of more than £1 billion. According to figures given to the Burma Campaign UK group, Triumph pays its employees just $1 a day for a six-day week, which works out at £220 per year, according to campaigners. But it insists that the working conditions in its Burmese plant meet European standards.

The company’s landlord is Union of Myanmar Economic Holdings, the board members of which have been linked by campaigners to the ruling military junta, the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). The SPDC has been accused of some of the most serious abuses of human rights of any government in the world. These include the detention of about 1,500 political prisoners, many of whom have been tortured. Ethnic minorities are persecuted and Burma, which the government calls Myanmar, is a big exporter of opium used to make heroin.

In 1990, it imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi, head of the National League for Democracy, who had won an election and has since won the Nobel peace prize. She has called on all foreign companies to withdraw from Burma.

Burma Campaign UK plans to increase pressure on Triumph in the new year. Members hope to sever the links of some high-profile sponsors, and will ask Brook and McAndrew to consider the implications of publicising the Triumph brand.

Mahon said: “Burma’s military dictatorship depends on investment from foreign companies to finance its oppressive rule. Foreign companies and Burma’s dictators are becoming richer, while Burma’s oppressed people grow ever poorer.”

Mass protests are planned outside Selfridges and Debenhams in London’s West End, calling for the stores to stop stocking Triumph products. Other protests will be staged around Britain. The campaign is supported by Glenys Kinnock, the MEP, Sinead Cusack, the actress, and Clive James, the television presenter and author.

Last October James Mawdsley was deported by the Burmese authorities after serving 14 months of a 17-year sentence imposed for distributing pro-democracy leaflets. Mawdsley, 28, a former Bristol University student from Lancashire, endured 416 days in solitary confinement. In 1998 he was jailed for three years for putting up pro-democracy posters.

Leading high-street brands are among multinational manufacturers accused of exploiting eastern European and Third World workers in sweatshop conditions.

Levi Strauss, the largest brand-name garment maker in the world, has been investigated for alleged “gulag” labour conditions in eastern European factories where female staff faced humiliating strip searches on finishing their shifts.

Gap contract factories in the Philipines, Lesotho, and El Salvador are accused of practices including seven-day working weeks, compulsory overtime, unhealthy and unsafe working conditions.

Disney was accused of sweatshop practices in 12 contract factories in southern China. Excessively long hours, poverty wages, workplace hazards and overcrowded workers’ dormitories were cited.

Benetton has been accused of halving wages at contract factories in Sicily, with illegal hiring and firing practices and dismissal of workers after marriage.

Turkish subcontractors were also investigated in 1998 for employing workers as young as 11 years old.

Source : The Sunday Times