I came across this rather disturbing story whilst trawling the news this morning.
https://news.sky.com/story/new-evidence-of-the-strict-controls-uighurs-face-in-factories-thousands-of-miles-from-home-12276248 (https://news.sky.com/story/new-evidence-of-the-strict-controls-uighurs-face-in-factories-thousands-of-miles-from-home-12276248)
It is suggested that the Chinese government is trafficking Uighurs to factories in distant parts of the country and offering them for sale in batches of fifty and one hundred as cheap labour.
This is pretty bad, even by Chinese standards, and raises some uncomfortable questions about Chinese manufactured goods shipped to the UK.
We have become dependant on Chinese manufacturing, so how can we be sure our suppliers are behaving ethically?
Thats a good question, and I don't know if there is an easy answer. I'd say buy local as much as you can moe generically, but for such a niche market like ours its not something we can do. The only power we would have is to try and inform the uk manufacturers that its important
Kader Industries (Bachmann/Farish) and Rapido own their own factories and I would expect them to be above using modern slave labour - Rapido's factories have appeared in their videos so they appear to not to have anything to hide.
I would also hope that Dapol, Revolution and the NGS have performed some due-diligence when choosing their factories.
Personally, I'd be more worried about where low cost electronic items from eBay have come from.
Steven B.
Hello all,
With two exceptions (one being a Rapido factory) Revolution have met all our suppliers personally and believe we can trust them to behave ethically and decently.
Also, while we should not be complacent, it is worth bearing in mind that China is vast. The area where the Uighurs come from is about as far from Hong Kong as London is from Moscow. Even Shandong, the north-eastern province mentioned in the report, is roughly the same distance as London is from Prague.
We will continue to monitor this situation, but the chances of some of these poor people ending up in one of the factories we (or any other UK model train companies) use is very small indeed.
cheers
Ben A.