They made our shoes. Now they need our help.

Action Reports

Tim Connor reports on one of the leafleting actions:

Distributing Global Actions against Sweatshop Flyers outside a Foot Locker store in Sydney Photo: Lara Grinevitch/Oxfam CAA

"I was most nervous about talking to the shop staff. I had imagined that talking about the sweatshop issue with them would be pretty awkward. Funnily enough, the woman behind the counter couldn't have been more supportive. She had no problem with us leafleting and was happy to ask her manager to pass our letters on to the brands.

"Five of us (me, Lara, Yvette, Elizabeth and Stewart) kicked off our participation in the month of action by spending an hour leafleting our local Footlocker store. This might sound odd, but we were surprised how much fun it was. I hadn't expected it, but there can be something exhilarating about talking to people in your local community about an issue that you are passionate about.

"We got all kinds of reactions - from the 6 year-old boy who was worried what people would eat if we "stopped sweet shops" to the older guy who wanted to tell us the entire history of sweatshop labour in every industry and continent - but most people who spoke to us were supportive, and most took a flier.

"Our only critic was a guy who also worked at the shop, who turned up 15 minutes after we started. He wanted to know why these workers didn't just get other jobs. (Our answer - Unemployment is so high in Indonesia that people will take almost any work they can get, but that doesn't make it okay for their wages to be so low that they can't look after their kids).

"Evidently we started a lively debate between the two shop staff. One of the people who delivered a letter came out to report that "I've just started World War III in there".

"We handed out over 200 fliers over the course of the hour. I checked up and down the street, but couldn't find any that had been dropped or trashed, so that's 200 people who know more about the issue. We then retired to a nearby watering hole to swap stories and plan next week's action, all of us on a bit of a high.

"A couple of notes on practicalities. We made really big copies of the poster at a photocopy place (only $2 each) and each of us held or wore one, so it was easy for people to see what we were on about. Two of us stood outside the store, and the others went a little way down the street on each side, so people could have time to see the posters, think about it, and then take a flier from the last person they passed.

"The most time-consuming thing is folding the fliers and the letters, so you might want to get your friends together before-hand for a few hours of folding and fold enough to last you for the whole month. When we were photocopying we reduced the letters to half-size so they fitted inside the fliers without having to be folded.

"That's it. I highly recommend getting involved. I think you'll be surprised how much fun you have."

As you can see from the tally, the number of actions reported in Week 1 was scarily small.

With so many campaigners being invited to take part, the global month of actions is a great opportunity for us to show big corporations how many people around the world want workers' human rights to be respected. If successful, the global month of action is something we can repeat every year, with more of us taking part each time.

But we need your participation to make it a success. The more of us who take part, the harder we are to ignore.

Check out the Action Pack and get involved.

Giving a flyer to a shopper outside Foot Locker in Sydney. Photo: Lara Grinevitch/Oxfam CAA

Distributing Global Actions against Sweatshop Flyers outside a Foot Locker store in SydneyPhoto: Lara Grinevitch/Oxfam CAA