Victoria's Secret is using cotton from forced child labor farms in Burkina Faso, according to a lengthy investigation by Cam Simpson at Bloomberg.
And it's a PR disaster.
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Simpson tells the heartwrenching story of 13-year-old Clarisse Kambire, who lives in constant fear at a West African cotton field. Beaten and made to do the work of an ox and plow, the cotton she helps grow ends up a "fair trade" program run by West African nation Burkina Faso. The entirety of last year's crop was bought by Victoria's Secret.
And so, Victoria's Secret has a major problem to deal with, as the scandal threatens to undermine its brand. Its response so far has been minimal. Here's Limited Brands' (Victoria's Secret's parent company) statement on the matter:
“They describe behavior contrary to our company’s values and the code of labor and sourcing standards we require all of our suppliers to meet. Our standards specifically prohibit child labor. We are vigorously engaging with stakeholders to fully investigate this matter.”
That's a positive note, and it's good that it's investigating, but there's no real information about what Victoria's Secret is doing to fix the problem. A company exec told Bloomberg that it the cotton it gets from Burkina Faso is "minimal." In that case, it shouldn't be too hard for the company to cut them off.
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Should Victoria's Secret had known? It's debatable. Fairtrade International said that Burkina Faso's program met its standards, and the UNPCB study on the situation there was never made public. A Limited Brands sourcing executive visited the country earlier this year and didn't see anything wrong.
Other companies have avoided major hits despite much wider spread child labor revelations. Take Nike, whose brand has long suffered from the stigma because of sweatshops and forced labor in Asia and elsewhere, with products from shoes to soccer balls being affected. Despite all that, the brand remains spectacularly powerful.
We'll see how the situation with Victoria's Secret turns out. Back in 2007, Gap experienced a similar disaster, when The Observer exposed child labor in India. It certainly hurt the company's wholesome, ethical image, but it was all forgotten by the everyday consumer before long. Will people care about Victoria's Secret's child labor problem, or just ignore it and continue dishing out $10 for cotton panties?
Either way, multinationals need to look more extensively into where their materials are coming from. But the source of the problem are the people that run these horrific farms in the first place. These big corporations have the power to turn them away, but ridding the world of the source is something local governments are responsible for.
