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Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2013 10:14 pm
by lutonlagerlout
a mate of mine is a cloth reseller
he pays around 50p a kilo for used clothes and shoes
he then flogs a tonne at a time to a middleman for around
£2000 a tonne (which is a lot of clothes)
this guy then sorts the clothes and shoes and exports them to africa and asia
they are then sold to local wholesalers and they then sell the stuff off to smaller vendors who maybe sell a Luton shirt for the equivalent of £1 of which they make 50p
this may seem like a lot of work and its taking stuff from charity shops but if you look through the linkages then there are a lot of little people in developing nations who can turn a buck from this,and start to make a living
when aid is just given,it tends to fall into the hands of the local warlord or mafia type, and the people its intended for get very little
IMHO
LLL
Posted: Thu Nov 07, 2013 10:28 pm
by Carberry
lutonlagerlout wrote:a mate of mine is a cloth reseller
he pays around 50p a kilo for used clothes and shoes
he then flogs a tonne at a time to a middleman for around
£2000 a tonne (which is a lot of clothes)
this guy then sorts the clothes and shoes and exports them to africa and asia
they are then sold to local wholesalers and they then sell the stuff off to smaller vendors who maybe sell a Luton shirt for the equivalent of £1 of which they make 50p
this may seem like a lot of work and its taking stuff from charity shops but if you look through the linkages then there are a lot of little people in developing nations who can turn a buck from this,and start to make a living
when aid is just given,it tends to fall into the hands of the local warlord or mafia type, and the people its intended for get very little
IMHO
LLL
Read an interesting book that expands on this idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki....ur_Time
First you have sh*t charities like Bono's that takes in £10 million in donations and only hands over £100,000 to Africa.
Then, at best, the little money that does arrive is spent on worthless stuff like giving them food instead of teaching them how to create their own food. At worst, the money goes into the hands of a corrupt government that buys their 1000th luxury car instead of spending it on infrastructure, education, improving women's rights etc
Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 8:52 am
by London Stone Paving
ETI and charity are 2 different things. We certainly did not join the ETI for charitable reasons. There has to be some commercial benefit to a company joining the ETI or it does just become charity (which is difficult to sustain). In the past there was probabrly a perception amongst stone companies that joining the ETI would see a huge uplift in sales but this could not be any further from the truth and any company joining the ETI for this reason is going to be hugely dissapointed. But if you look beyond that then there are other commercial advantages to be gained by joining the ETI. We joined so we could improve our business. We source a lot of material from India (as do most stone companies) and before we joined the ETI we did not have a stable pool of suppliers.
Part of the reason we joined the ETI was because we wanted to build long term relationships with a higher quality of supplier. Since joining the ETI we have seen year on year improvements in the quality of our stone, packaging and production lead times.
Its not all about child labour and exploitation. For example, one of the biggest triggers to non compliance of ethical trade is a companies purchasing practices. Before we joined the ETI our purchasing practices were almost non existant. We were constantly placing orders at short notice (often complicated bespoke orders) and then expecting our suppliers to deliver them quickly. Looking back at it now we must have been putting our Indian suppliers under untold pressure. Its when you put your suppliers under this type of pressure that they might be more likely to use cheap unskilled labour, put pressure on staff to work long hours and not care about H&S. Since joining the ETI we learnt about how to purchase properly and now we give our suppliers ordering forecasts which allow them to plan things at their end. Its better for our suppliers, its better for their staff and its better for London Stone.
ETI is about working with your suppliers to improve the supply chain for the benefit of everyone in it and that includes us here in the UK
Posted: Fri Nov 08, 2013 2:46 pm
by Bob_A
Well put! 
Posted: Sun Nov 10, 2013 9:47 am
by Tony McC
Further to what I wrote in that news/comment piece, I've since been told that Britain is actually the biggest single customer for stone exports from Rajasthan.
We were told at the meeting that only 4% of all stone quarried was exported which is a pretty small lever for this "levveridge" of which we hear so much, but Britain is responsible (if that's the right word) for around 1.8% of sales by tonnage, leaving just 2.2% going to ROW. This doesn't dramatically change my view that, on it's own Britain is a flea on the dog's back and therefore more or an irritant than a force for change, but I now see we are a much bigger flea than first imagined.
Steven is right about ETI - it's not charity, and it's not a sales gimmick. It doesn't have a dramtic impact on sales volumes for precisely the reasons echoed by other contributors to this thread - too many custiomers are concerned only with cost. And there will always be a rump of the trade willing to serve those customers, so what ETI has to do is re-educate the stone-buying public in Britain and further afield, and work with the supply chain in India to get them to understand that better ethics means better product and that means more regular orders, as evidenced by Steven's comments.
There is no simple fix here. It's a seemingly intractable problem with roots stretching back thousands of years into Indian culture and we'd be incredibly naive to think we can sort out all that in a couple of years. It's a multi-generational task, but one that has to be done because allowing poverty and, more importantly, disparity in wealth and rights, to fester will only feed the sense of anger towards those of us on the "have" side of the border and encourage further social unrest in a volatile part of the world.
Posted: Sun Nov 10, 2013 10:33 pm
by lutonlagerlout
as in most things the end result comes to money
its the reason why wembley stadium ,and most premiership grounds, schools,takewaway chains,and prisons, serve "halal" meat
the reason being that "halal" meat is a lot cheaper wholesale than " normal " meat
so its not being done to pander to 1 religion
purely a cost cutting measure dressed up to look good
LLL
Posted: Sun Nov 17, 2013 10:59 am
by mickg