What is Victoria's Secret? Hint: It Involves Thin Young Ladies at Exotic Locations

[XLFD]

Bloomberg recently uncovered a disturbing story that may make you consider your future purchases of intimate wear from that well known company. 

Clarisse Kambire’s nightmare rarely changes. It’s daytime. In a field of cotton plants that burst with purple and white flowers, a man in rags towers over her, a stick raised above his head. Then a voice booms, jerking Clarisse from her slumber and making her heart leap. “Get up!”

The man ordering her awake is the same one who haunts the 13-year-old girl’s sleep: Victorien Kamboule, the farmer she labors for in a West African cotton field. Before sunrise on a November morning she rises from the faded plastic mat that serves as her mattress, barely thicker than the cover of a glossy magazine, opens the metal door of her mud hut and sets her almond-shaped eyes on the first day of this season’s harvest.

 

She had been dreading it. “I’m starting to think about how he will shout at me and beat me again,” she said two days earlier. Preparing the field was even worse. Clarisse helped dig more than 500 rows with only her muscles and a hoe, substituting for the ox and the plow the farmer can’t afford. If she’s slow, Kamboule whips her with a tree branch.

This harvest is Clarisse’s second. Cotton from her first went from her hands onto the trucks of a Burkina Faso program that deals in cotton certified as fair trade. The fiber from that harvest then went to factories in India and Sri Lanka, where it was fashioned into Victoria’s Secret underwear -- like the pair of zebra-print, hip-hugger panties sold for $8.50 at the lingerie retailer’s Water Tower Place store on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.

 

Clarisse’s Cotton

“Made with 20 percent organic fibers from Burkina Faso,” reads a stamp on that garment, purchased in October.

Forced labor and child labor aren’t new to African farms. Clarisse’s cotton, the product of both, is supposed to be different. It’s certified as organic and fair trade, and so should be free of such practices.

Planted when Clarisse was 12, all of Burkina Faso’s organic crop from last season was bought by Victoria’s Secret (LTD), according to Georges Guebre, leader of the country’s organic and fair- trade program, and Tobias Meier, head of fair trade for Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation, a Zurich-based development organization that set up the program and has helped market the cotton to global buyers. Meier says Victoria’s Secret also was expected to get most of this season’s organic harvest, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its February issue.

 

Read the rest at : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-15/victoria-s-secret-revealed...

 

This story has fair trade issues, child labor issues, and business ethics issues.  It is something that tears at you this time of year, when you think about your own neighborhood's kids.

[Willy]

There's an estimated 300 million children world wide who are forced to work. Many need to work to help the family survive. Others are sold into servitude. It's not only cotton and Victoria Secrets but most anything made, recycled, manufactured or altered throughout the world. That had been one of my major beefs with Wal-mart. The use of child labor in China to make the products sold in their stores. 

[XLFD]

Three hundred million children worldwide who are forced into work.  That is one for every citizen in this Country.  Foreign aid doesn't work, and the U.S. and other civilized countries that trade with such countries need to adapt their trade policies accordingly.  Powerful pictures, Willy.

[Heaven Therzke]

X-LFD you don't want our government telling you what to do, why think other countries would.  don't blame victorias secret for free market thinking in fair trade of goods and having kids get into the workplace early, a lot of our kids don't.  and don't bunch your panties.  happy holidays and go buy some V.S. for your hun this year.

[XLFD]

Market capitalism is a good thing, Heaven, but if consumers are well-informed and find out that a company is exploiting kids in slavelike conditions, they may be able to force the company to do the right thing.

Unless something is done, if any lady parades in front of me wearing some sexy undergarments from Victoria's Secret, I will inform her to take them off immediately and tell her why.  Hmmm, this has possibilities, LOL.

[Sweater Cows!]

My kid is 10 and wants a job, but thanks to child labor laws I had to tell her the only ones she could get were the ones she would have to compete with an l/illegal migrant for. She is not interested in farm work paid under the table.