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.
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.
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.
Of course they knew. For Ingvar Kamprad, it was all about saving money. No matter what.