Jeremy Corbyn, the newly elected leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, raised about 100,000 pounds (about $154,245) from “Team Corbyn” apparel, but The Daily Mail has reported that workers in Nicaragua and Haiti had made the shirts, earning about 75 cents an hour. The T-shirts cost supporters about $15.
The workers in Haiti were paid based on how many shirts they could make. One woman told The Daily Mail that she earns about the equivalent of $30 for a six-day workweek.
This comes after Corbyn gave a victory speech, highlighting his determination to fight poverty and inequality.
“We have grown enormously because of the hopes of so many ordinary people for a different Britain,” he said in his speech. “They are fed up with the inequality, the injustice, the unnecessary poverty.”
Corbyn also has been vocal about his desire to aid the poor and oppressed people of Latin America.
“The heroic Sandinista government in Nicaragua from the 1979 liberation was eventually defeated by the U.S.-backed Contra and economic strangulation,” he wrote on his website. “Nicaragua is now the poorest country in the region.”
The workers in the factories earned around $155 per month—the equivalent of about 10 of the Jeremy Corbyn T-shirts they made.
Emma Maltes, a secretary for one of the factory unions, told The Daily Mail that workers often say that they don’t earn enough money to feed their families.
