"Working" refugees

Three days ago we talked about the entrepreneurship story of the founder of Inditex, the matrix of Zara. We mentioned the shadows that this company had, but we didn’t get into any detail. BBC has done it for us. They broadcasted on Sunday a program about how Turkish factories employ Syrian refugee kids to make clothes. Zara was, together with other big chains like Marks & Spencer, one of the retails that would afterwards distribute those clothes.

Marks & Spencer labels shwon in the program

What BBC’s Panorama showed was the conditions in which refugees, both adults and children, are “employed” in some Turkish factories; they had access to contracts stablishing a payment of one euro per hour. Also, the working conditions, the safety measures and the number of daily hours were far from meeting any decent standard. At least not ours, maybe those standards are not far from Turkish ones, but that’s what happens when you pay a country to get all the refugees you don’t want, because Turkey is already safe, no Human Rights are violated there. Right, Europe?

Let’s get back to the topic. The big Europeans brands that are using these companies are suppliers have already said that they are investigating or that they didn’t know because it was a supplier of a supplier. Of course, they condemn child labor and the exploitation of refugees, some of them already explained that they are collaborating with NGOs to stop that… But these companies are getting millions every day, and in order to do that, being completely fair and caring is not always their most profitable way.

But hey! We are all furious now… go and check your closest Zara or Marks & Spencer shop… I bet it’s not empty. So, who’s the last responsible?

We have always heard that the problem of migration is in the origin, that we have to act there. And it’s true, the drama of these people is not because they want to arrive to Europe; it’s because they don’t want to leave their countries. But there is not much to do for regular citizens about it. Also not many chances for us to leave our jobs and studies to go to the Mediterranean and help. But we do have a power where we are. And it’s bigger than we think.

This case that BBC unveiled has had a big media effect, mainly because the firms involved are the ones we use every day and because we feel it close enough. But it’s just a tiny extra problem in the life of Syrian refugees. And for them it might not be even a problem, because in their conditions, finding a job like that, even if it’s completely unfair and unsafe, it’s the only option to keep surviving.

But this problem goes much further than Syrian refugees. They are usually the most dramatic and present cases, but there is much more out there about the migration topic, also if we don’t know about it. Therefore, our “Migration: From challenge to opportunity” will try to bring some light into one of the most complex of today’s challenges.

(Published in the Blog of Aspire. Manufactury of Change to promote the  Aspire Conference 2016)

Entrepreneurship out of Silicon Valley

Busdongo de Arbás is a small village in the northwest of Spain. Located 1300 meters over the level of the sea, winters are very hard for the 100 inhabitants of this place, most of them, retired railway men and coal miners who have seen better times in their industries. Most people in Busdongo have no idea about where Silicon Valley is, and many don’t even know what Google or Apple are. But they do know one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever, Amancio Ortega, born there 80 years ago.

He lived there until he was 14, when his father, a worker of the railway company, was sent to A Coruña, a big city by the Atlantic coast. Shortly afterwards, he began to work for a local shirtmaker. In 1972 he started a bathrobe business and three years later, together with his wife, he opened the first Zara shop. That shop would become the flagship of the biggest fashion group in the world, Inditex.

The business model of Zara and Inditex redefined the whole fashion system: they produce and sell fashionable products with moderate prices; they designed a computer system when not so many companies were even aware of the importance that it would have in the future; they don’t make any advertising outside of their shops, which are located in some of the most commercial corners and buildings of the world; they work with very tight inventories, what allows them to sell their fashion during the season, without needing to reduce their price to get rid of stock; they have a diversified group of shops, so they cover almost every spectrum of the fashion world… This multinational company owns nowadays more than 7000 shops in more than 90 countries in 5 continents. And thanks to it, Amancio Ortega is now sitting next to Bill Gates as the richest man on Earth.

Now, we don’t want to forget that there are shadows in that road to success, even though we can consider Inditex as a more or less fair player in the capitalism game. And no, we don’t always like that game. So, if we don’t like something, we have to change it, and no better way to do this than showing that there are alternatives.

Today, an entrepreneur in the field of fashion would need very likely more than just cheap trendy clothes; eco-friendly processes and completely fair labor conditions could be a nice option. Maybe not to become richer than Amancio Ortega, but to prove that entrepreneurship is another way of changing the rules, making your business your own particular Manufactury of Change.

Far from the glamour of North American garages and smartphones, this was an example of a real successful entrepreneurship story and, somehow, we could also see it as an aspiring one. There will be many of those, even more interesting, in our “Challenging paradigms through new business models” track.

(Published in the Blog of Aspire. Manufactury of Change to promote the Aspire Conference 2016)