When an industry's excuses have to stop

I am unmoved by Primark's plight. So, the retailer was badly 'let down' by three Indian factories that contravened the company's 'strict ethical standards' by outsourcing the embroidery of 20,000 on-trend pieces to small children. Retailers and brands have been offering excuses for years now, ever since the Chicago Tribune rumbled a major sportswear manufacturer using child labour in 1996. Similarly there's a wide selection of pleas to cover the times a brand gets caught running up this season's collection in a sweatshop - varying from downright denial or rebuttal to Gap's surprising, 'listen guys, we have a problem and we will fix it' (circa 2005).

Primark opted for a zero tolerance and was apparently so disgusted that, despite lending its support to Retail Week's A Source for Good campaign last year which pledged to work with 'failing factories rather than abandon them', immediately jettisoned the Tirupur three. The company points out that this unfortunate use of child labour was not in any way connected to the low price of the fashion it sells - apparently achieved by low mark-ups and big volumes.

I still feel uneasy. While there is no doubt that value retailers shift a lot of product, there is plenty of evidence and testimonies from garment workers to show that the pressure and speed of orders directly adds to the misery of working conditions. In the latest edition of Clothingsource, a tool for the mainstream garment trade, sourcing expert Mike Flanagan worries that, as China runs short of workers, there will be a slide back into the use of child labour.

I accept that big retailers don't actively run around themselves recruiting kids to work, but that is almost beside the point. What absolves retail giants from taking responsibility for their supply chains? Our fashion predominantly arrives courtesy of a complex chain, where one garment owes its existence to workers and resources from many of the world's most desperate countries. Lawrence Warren, who spent 20 years sourcing shoes for major labels before he starting his own ethical footwear label, says: 'Retailers who sell clothes at particularly low prices tend to use a lot of middlemen and not have much contact with their suppliers.' Making it, he says, more likely that use of child labour will go undetected.

In an industry of scant transparency, you can imagine how difficult it is for the handful of journalists who operate in this area to get solid evidence of exploitation. And yet they unearth horror stories with alarming regularity. This leads me to the depressing conclusion that the stories we see represent the tip of the iceberg rather than the exceptions.

If these 'abuses' are just a reality of today's outsourced, mass-market rag trade, then it's time retailers told us. How about a label in the must-have sun dress that reads: 'We have absolutely no idea who made this garment because all production was outsourced to low-cost suppliers in Asia.' Then, consumers could make a real decision about what they put in their wardrobes and whether to take the risk that a child embroidered the hem.

That way we wouldn't have to listen to retailers competing with each other on the basis of how many 'audits' they do. These are famously unreliable. We are constantly told cheap-as-chips fashion is a democratiser of style and many retailers now like to add a rail of organic cotton T-shirts to show how ethical they are. Do I buy this? No, but neither can I bring myself to buy their clothes.