Furniture giant IKEA has agreed to pay 6 million euros ($6.5 million) towards a government fund compensating victims of forced labor under Germany’s communist dictatorship, in a move campaigners hope will pressure other companies to follow.
“After it became known that the company was involved in forced prison labor, IKEA accepted our invitation to talk.”
So from the sound of it IKEA didn’t give two shits as long as no one knew, just like any other big company. You cannot tell me that people at IKEA simply didn’t know, someone knew.
Pretty much everyone knew but OTOH it’s not like they were making contracts with prisons, they had contracts with ordinary GDR companies which used prison labour to supplement their own workforce, often on an irregular basis. E.g. if you had a contract with a GDR company to supply a certain number of t-shirts per month for three years, they’d do it with their own workforce, they’d get another short-term contract and fulfil part of that and part of your contract with prison labour. The whole economy was infested with it, basically impossible to do business with the GDR and not have prison labour involved somewhere in the supply chain. What are you expecting, you’re doing business with tankies.
I’d see stronger culpability if they had been contracting out dangerous work. GDR wasn’t stellar at work safety in general, not atrocious either, but prison labour in e.g. the chemical industry? It’s not that they didn’t gave a fuck, it was extra unsafe by design.
Of course they knew. For Ingvar Kamprad, it was all about saving money. No matter what.
I am sure Ikea will acknowledge having contributed to illegal deforestation of original forests in Romania, Belarus, and Russia in the 2020s at some point, too.
This was slavery, in the eighties, and Ikea figured they could benefit from it (they 100% knew) and save what I suppose was an absurd amount of money
40 years later they pay 6 millions
I know many corporations are awful but we should’t become desensitized. How can you still shop there knowing this
Because they are currently the only company acknowledging their fault? Boycotting them while ignoring all the other companies benefiting from the exact same practice seems counterproductive…
They didn’t reveal the information, the former prisoners first shone light on it when they asked for compensation.
They only felt like they had to make amends once the story came out, not during the 30 years prior. strange how that goesTake control of the narrative.
Pay a research group to confirm what has already been revealed. On the wikipedia page it almost seems like the whole thing was their idea
(from a quick search this was revealed in 2011 by a german media, opening Stasi files)
And it works too
This is in no way a defense, but rather an accusation: many other companies pull or have pulled similar things. Hasbro famously used near slave labor when they partnered with Good Shepherd Sisters, one of many similar “Magdalene Laundries”; religious convents that some women were put in for sins as horrifying as “having a baby out of wedlock.”
Behind the Bastards discusses them in their episodes titled “How the catholic church murdered Ireland’s babies”
At first glance I thought this was satirical, implying ikea was fined for making people build their own furniture.
