Minnie Driver meets the garment workers

Although Minnie Driver hadn't arrived in Thailand's Bangkok airport until after midnight she was ready early next morning to visit the city's first garment workers co-operative.

The Solidarity Co-operative was set up by workers who had previously worked for the huge Bed & Bath Prestige company which produced clothes for many international brands such as Nike, Adidas and Levi's. Bed & Bath closed without warning in October 2002. Overnight more than 900 hundred workers most of whom, were women, lost their jobs and their livelihoods with no severance pay.

When 3 months of protest at the Ministry of Labour produced only limited results, some of those workers decided to pool their labour and start Thailand's first co-operative factory. Although they are still paying back their start-up loan, the Solidarity Co-operative is now able to pay workers a monthly salary and they no longer have to work the punishing hours of overtime which they used to.

Minnie was greeted with garlands of jasmine and orchids before chatting to the workers, finding out about their lives and their work.  Jaruwan Pol-in, 36, told her that she lives 8 hours away from her home, in the impoverished Surin province, and from her 6 year old daughter who she manages to visit only three times a year.  She earns 4,500 baht (Thai currency) a month which is about £64 (US$110). She sends a quarter home. It's less than she earned at Bed and Bath but she doesn't have to work until 2 am or get fined two days salary just for eating a lemon as one of her co-workers did.

Afterwards Jaruwan showed Minnie how to make a T shirt.

Solidarity are still struggling to build up orders and in the meantime are taking subcontracted work from bigger companies.  Subcontracting is common practice in the Thai garment industry and means that many big buyers never see the workers who produce their goods. When Minnie visited, the factory had taken delivery of all the pieces needed to make up patterned babies leggings with sewn in feet, each with a ribbon on.  Finally a label had to be sewn in and the garment pressed before it was ready.  For this the factory received  5 baht each - just over 7p or 12.5 cents.  They were making 3,000 pairs of these leggings and estimated it would take 8 workers 3 days to finish the job.