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.

  • @Imhotep@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    222 days ago

    This was slavery, in the eighties, and Ikea figured they could benefit from it (they 100% knew) and save what I suppose was an absurd amount of money

    40 years later they pay 6 millions

    I know many corporations are awful but we should’t become desensitized. How can you still shop there knowing this

    • @ridago@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      112 days ago

      Because they are currently the only company acknowledging their fault? Boycotting them while ignoring all the other companies benefiting from the exact same practice seems counterproductive…

      • @Imhotep@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        7
        edit-2
        2 days ago

        They didn’t reveal the information, the former prisoners first shone light on it when they asked for compensation.
        They only felt like they had to make amends once the story came out, not during the 30 years prior. strange how that goes

        Take control of the narrative.

        Pay a research group to confirm what has already been revealed. On the wikipedia page it almost seems like the whole thing was their idea

        (from a quick search this was revealed in 2011 by a german media, opening Stasi files)

        And it works too

    • @chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      3
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      This is in no way a defense, but rather an accusation: many other companies pull or have pulled similar things. Hasbro famously used near slave labor when they partnered with Good Shepherd Sisters, one of many similar “Magdalene Laundries”; religious convents that some women were put in for sins as horrifying as “having a baby out of wedlock.”

      Behind the Bastards discusses them in their episodes titled “How the catholic church murdered Ireland’s babies”