Tag: Who’s responsible

RESPONSE: if your trade justice activism points the finger at consumers, or a corporation, or a… and says that they’re responsible for the injustice you’re highlighting, you can expect people to say that responsibility is always shared. Loads of people, living and working throughout (and beyond) a supply chain, have to change their ways for the just future you want to see to take shape.

Posted on by

Handbook: example page

Hiatt shackles

Made in England
Worn in Cuba

KEY FACTS

Type:
Protest & activist campaign
Dates:
8 Sept 2005 & 1 Jan 2007
Organisers:
Amnesty International, Reprieve, Save Omar Campaign, Birmingham Guantanamo Campaign, Muslim Public Affairs Committee
Location:
Hiatt & Co., Baltimore Road, Birmingham, UK

INGREDIENTS

INTENTIONS

Change government behaviour
Change corporate behaviour

TACTICS

Target the right brand
Hold ’em accountable
Put your bodies in the way
Embody exploitation
Make the hidden visible

RESPONSES

There is no alternative
Who’s responsible?

IMPACTS

Corporations change
Workers suffer

Image credit

followthethings.com


Tackle the shackles

IN BRIEF

British citizens are detained in the USA’s Guantanamo Bay detention centre, but none are charged with a crime. They notice the shackles restraining them are ‘Made in England’, just like them. When some go on hunger strike in 2005, and when the 5th anniversary of the centre’s opening takes place in 2007, musicians, doctors, lawyers, comedians and activists protest outside the factory where they are made. Their use at Guantanamo, they argue, is unethical and illegal.

How to read this page

We are slowly piecing together a ‘followthethings.com handbook for trade justice activism’ and are publishing the pages here as we write them. This is an ‘example’ page. The wide column paraphrases and condenses this example’s followthethings.com page, section by section. The narrow column contains some details about the commodity, some key facts about the activism that took place around it, and a list of its ‘ingredients’: its intentions, tactics, responses and impacts. These have been identified during the writing of this example page and, as more handbook pages are added, you will be able to click each one to read about it, and there will be links to other examples where we have found that ingredient, and a list of linked ingredients. This hypertext format, we believe, will help readers to understand how trade justice activism can work, and what it can do.

Original

Description

Human rights activists wearing Hiatt shackles protest outside Birmingham factory where they are made. A band plays on a flatbed truck as 20 people dressed in orange Guantanamo Bay jumpsuits dance the ‘Shackle Shuffle’. Comedian Mark Thomas, doctor David Nicholls, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith and the brother of Omar Deghayes, a hunger-striking British detainee, climb up to speak. Media, police and locals watch them accuse Hiatt of being complicit in, and profiting from, this torture and illegal detention. 14 months later, 70 or 80 are back in orange to ‘celebrate’ the fifth anniversary of Guantanamo’s opening. Sandy Mitchell, tortured in Saudi Arabia in Hiatt shackles, speaks and returns his shackles through the factory’s letterbox. A birthday cake is made for Hiatt with a detainee inside. This old company made ‘n***er collars’ for the slave trade. ‘If William Wilberforce were alive’, Nicholls says, ‘he’d be standing here today, doing the Shackle Shuffle, saying ‘this is outrageous’’. The UK government, with its ‘ethical foreign policy’, should press the US to charge the detainees with their crimes, or set them free.

Inspiration / process / methodology

The Three Piece Suit chains your hands in front of you and attaches to a waist belt. Another chain links the belt to your ankle where a foot-long chain ties both feet together so you can only shuffle, not walk. They can tie you to a ring in the floor, as you stand or squat, or to a ceiling or the top of a cage where you can hang, for hours. Each has ‘Hiatt’, ‘Made In England’ stamped into it, British detainees told their lawyer, Stafford Smith. ‘It was ironic’, Moazzem Begg said, that they were ‘made in England, just like me and him’. Nicholls wrote to Hiatt to stop US sales while their goods were being used for torture. ‘This is what happens when you don’t answer your post’, he said at the protest. In 2007, NGOs published media and campaign packs to coordinate actions and focus messages. Local MPs joined in. These protests were national news.

Discussions / responses

I’d love to see President Bush and Prime Minsiter Blair shackled outside the factory. A freedom of information request was refused as not in the ’public interest’. It wouldn’t make a difference if Hiatt ceased production. Others would make shackles and Hiatt’s employees would lose their jobs. If the factory shut, its new US owner Armor Holdings could blame the protestors. Factories were shutting all around. At least this one was still making things. And maybe the Guantanamo shackles were old stock, exported years ago, before the UK export ban. Maybe they started as legally-exported handcuffs and were modified in the US? Shackles aren’t illegal there. We weren’t aware of supplying Guantanamo, Hiatt said. We do sell to the US Department of Defence but we’re not responsible for what they do with stuff, said Hiatt. They don’t tell you to cuff someone to the top of a door, do they?

Impacts / outcomes

Hiatt’s Birmingham factory shut in 2008 and 15 people lost their jobs. This followed a consolidation process by BAE Systems who bought Armor Holdings in July 2007. Production shifted to a Hiatt factory in New Hampshire, USA, nearer its customer base, to be stamped ‘Made in USA.’ UK police bought Hiatt handcuffs on eBay. The Hiatt brand was dropped. Protestors were glad that one less British company was supplying equipment for use in Guantanamo.

FOLLOWTHETHINGS.COM PAGE

Shifrina, D. (2013) followthethings.com/tackle-the-shackles

DEPARTMENT: Security

By Ian Cook (June 2025)