25 January 2005
"Supermarkets make billions of pounds of profit. Here people can’t survive, they can’t feed themselves." - Wendy Pekeur, leader of South African trade union and ActionAid partner Sikhula Sonke.
ActionAid’s Who Pays? campaign fights for a better deal for the people who make our clothes and grow our food, most of whom are women. By connecting developing country workers with UK consumers, Who Pays? challenges companies and governments to make food and fashion fair.
Most of us shop in British supermarkets and take advantage of cheaper clothes on the high street, but whilst the retailers continue to push for lower prices and increasing profits, who is paying the price?
All too often, the true cost of cheap products in our shops is passed down the supply chain to the workers at the bottom. They end up poorly paid and easily exploited.
ActionAid has been campaigning to make UK supermarkets play fair overseas since 2005. We now have Government commitment to create a groceries adjudicator which would ensure that supermarkets give a better deal to suppliers overseas.
ActionAid has been campaigning since 2005 to make UK supermarkets play fair overseas.
We’ve had an amazing response to the campaign from over 42,000 of you taking action. All three of the main political parties committed to the issue in their manifestos and Albert Owen MP’s Grocery Market Ombudsman Bill passed uncontested through to Committee Stage in the last sitting of parliament before the election.
We now have a lot of work to do to make sure that the new government’s commitment to a watchdog doesn’t drop off the agenda.
Meanwhile ActionAid has been working with a groundbreaking coalition of NGOs, trade unions and other workers’ organisations to demand that clothes retailers and suppliers pay a living wage to Asian garment workers once and for all.