CAMPAIGNERS against low pay and unemployment are appealing for help from teenage spies to expose Bolton firms employing "slave labour".

The move, by Salford TUC Centre, follows allegations that an un-named Bolton firm, is employing a 16-year-old girl unpaid for nearly six months on the pretext that she is undergoing training.

A woman telephoned the centre on Monday and told advice worker, Dennis Fairbrother that her daughter had started work at a company in Bolton but was told she would not be paid until July.

Mr Fairbrother said: "The girl was given no details of the so-called training involved. Her mother would not give her name and has not come back to me but I believe her because we have come across a case like this before. What it amounts to is slave labour and it is preying on the desperation of young people and their families." Mr Fairbrother wants to recruit an army of young people to go undercover and apply for jobs in the Bolton and Salford area to expose the practice.

He said the TUC centre would then publish the names of the employers in the hope that they would be shamed into ending the custom.

Mr Fairbrother said: "There is a growing fear than more employers are using this so-called training scam to exploit youngsters and get free labour.

"In cases like this the young people have virtually no rights because if they are not paid they are not given employee status.

"Young people have been used in the past to catch out shopkeepers who sell cigarettes and fireworks to children so I don't see why we can't use 16-year-olds to expose unscrupulous employers. "This sort of thing must be stamped out. At least when children were sent down the mines and into the mills they were paid. This is absolutely monstrous and it is real indication of how desperate some people are when they are willing to work for nothing for six months in the hope there will be a job at the end of it."

Mr Fairbrother is also appealing to the mother of the 16-year-old to contact him at the TUC Centre on 0161 7892999.

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