:date: 2012-12-09 17:37 .. index:: life H&M's Charme offensive ====================== .. image:: /_images/images/gallery/2012/2012-placeholder/20121107184512-youngstorget.jpg :align: right :scale: 50 The Swedish retail-clothing company H&M has started its Charme offensive to polish their lately turned out to be `dirty background-business `__. This way the seem to confirm that the negative news lately might have had some impact on their business. At least here. And suddenly there was this water clock on `Youngstorget `__, running a permanent commercial, nicely woven into the pre-christmas time. Basically `the same `__ as in the `Osaka Trainstation `__. And it's quite fascinating to see water being used for displaying the time, the date or what ever. Everything, just to show off. Look how nice we are, we've paid for this, just to entertain you. In a second step their new bills with the model in lingerie, made even me like their promotion. WTF? Is it so easy to persuade me? So, for a personal reminder here are some of their sinns they're trying to make you forget about them. * 2012, November `H&M is still working one year later to increate the salaries of their workers in Cambodia `__ * 2012, Februar: `H&M uses artwork without permission or payment to the artist and denies first that they did so `__ * 2011, August: `~300 workers in Cambodia supplying H&M passed out mostly due to fumes from chemials and poor ventilation. The monthly minimum wage of those workers is at about 500NOK. `__ * 2011, August: `H&M doensn't like work councils and tries to get rid of them if possible. `__ * 2010, January: `H&M stores are throwing away clothes, not without making sure they can't be used by homeless people `__ * 2008, November: `H&M get confronted with a quite bad production situation in their factories in Bangladesh. Forced overtime, beaten workers, sexual harassment `__ * 2007, November: `H&M uses wool from Usbekistan, harvested by kids. H&M is argumenting that a boykott of wool wouldn't let any child benefit anyway `__ That took just a couple of minutes to find these information. What would have happened if I really would have started diggin? I wonder what could have changed, if they had put the money for the marketing into their workers or the improvement of their working conditions instead?