A whistleblower who cannot be identified from Leicester's textile industry says some factories almost doubled their staffing to cope with online orders during the Covid-19 lockdown. The worker said firms that "maybe used to have 50 people working comfortably, now had 80 or 90 people in the same area".
The worker told the BBC some factories had stayed open and taken on extra staff during the lockdown.
He said the situation had made already poor conditions worse. "Very few factories, if any, have cleaners coming in and out," he said. "I've seen people eating at their tables, then going straight back to work. There's no kitchens in a lot of these places, there's barely toilets, and it's all logged because it's all about productivity rather than humanity."
"If somebody did have Covid or wasn't well, they were still there passing it on to whoever's next to them," he said. "During Covid we've had no social distancing whatsoever in the factories. They [factory bosses] were getting a lot of pressure from customers to produce garments as quickly as possible, in as much volume as possible, because people were shopping from home and they needed the goods to be in. So the pressure was on these suppliers to hire anybody that was walking around and just get somebody on a machine to make a garment. Garments go through, six, seven pairs of hands before they get packed and sealed, so a lot of people are touching the same things."
The whistleblower said the falling price paid for products had led to a "substantial" decline in pay rates and working conditions over the past 10 years.
"The way the market is at the minute, it's the person who produces the good cheapest who gets the order," he said.
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