The staff of a DHL depot have received an award after adopting an army platoon that was serving in Afghanistan.

The depot staff raised funds through a range of events and workplace competitions which was then used to purchase MP4 players and iPods, magazines, sweets, biscuits and other dry foods and even wholesale casual clothing to help make the lives of the soldiers a little more comfortable.

In 2009, they raised over £20,000 for a variety of causes including the Ava platoon, demonstrating how workplace initiatives can really help, not only by raising funds but by boosting morale and creating relationships that sustain people coping with extreme hardship.

The depot has been granted the Royal British Legion’s Friends of The Forces corporate award for its “extraordinary” work with the soldiers and DHL Droitwich’s Community Liaison Officer said, ‘At the end of the day, you may think you’re having a bad day at the office but it doesn’t compare when it’s hot, you’re getting shot at, blown up and you’ve got sand in every crevice of your body … If all firms could do what we did it would do a lot of good.’

Workplace charity initiatives range from supporting local playgroups by donating leftover paint and paper for creative play through to massive fundraising campaigns by national organisations to fund hospital units or mentoring opportunities offered to individuals ranging from potential athletes to disabled young people to ex-offenders or those recovering from serious illnesses.

Earlier this week, two schoolgirls, dressed in Edwardian clothing, buttonholed David Cameron on the steps of Number Ten.  They sold him a rose, continuing a tradition that has run for nearly a hundred years – since 1912 when Queen Alexandra started the Charities’ Charity by selling a rose to the Prime Minister of the day, who put it in his buttonhole.

The two 16-year-olds attend Francis Holland School sixth form, and were chosen for their exceptional charity work – both have been both volunteers and fundraisers for charities while studying at the school. They wore the traditional white dresses, pink sashes and straw boaters that have been the hallmark of the Charities’ Charity since it was set up by the Queen to sell silk roses, made by London flower girls to raise funds for her preferred causes. Today the recipient gets a rose pin made of enamel and Alexandra Rose Charities help  more than 250 other charities, many of which are very small and local.

The Charities’ Charity may have been one of the first to use specialist clothing to raise funds, but today nearly every charity with a national profile has charity-branded clothing such as slogan printed T-shirts, hats with embroidered logos or even ‘gimmick’ clothing like Pudsey Bear’s spotty bandana.

In New York, a female banker is taking her former employers to court over sacking her because she was ‘too attractive’.  Debrahlee Lorenzana is claiming that Citibank fired her because her pencil skirts and fitted suits were distracting male colleagues from their work.

According to her complaint, she was ordered not to wear high heels because they drew attention to her figure and stopped men from working, but female colleagues who wore similar clothes were not told to change their appearance because, according to Ms Lorenzana, they were less attractive than her. She was also given a list of the clothes her employer wanted her to stop wearing to the office – she was asked by her employer not to wear: turtleneck tops, pencil skirts, fitted business suits, or other properly tailored clothing and that she shouldn’t wear high heels either.

So what’s the law? Well it varies from country to country, but it is discriminatory to insist that people dress in a fashion that is different to their colleagues, so if everybody else is wearing casual clothing, you can’t insist one person dresses formally if they are doing the same job. On the other hand, work-specific clothing can be insisted on, particularly if people do jobs that have health or safety implications: catering staff must dress in a way that guarantees hygiene so aprons and hats are not just required but legally stipulated, and builders and other construction workers need to have safety clothing that protects them, and the public, from harm.

In the past week or so, literally thousands of fake football shirts have been pouring into England, but they haven’t been reaching their purchasers.

Counterfeiting experts and representatives of the major clothing companies are working with the staff of the international mail sorting office in Coventry to intercept fake replica shirts and T-shirts that have been manufactured in China, Thailand and Malaysia and sold online. It’s a multi-billion pound illegal trade that doesn’t just leave fans out of pocket: it’s been linked to drug trafficking and child labour.

Faked national and Premier League football shirts, cost anything from £9 to £30 from online counterfeiters while the genuine article, this year, costs between £35 and £58.  In 2009, over 50,000 counterfeit replica shirts, worth over £1 million, were seized in the UK, leaving a lot of disappointed customers and with the World Cup starting this week, that figure is expected to double in 2010.

What to look out for

•    Check that logos are real – even online you can often spot that a logo has been reversed, or isn’t entirely accurate.
•    Check that the website you’re visiting is legitimate – where possible, buy from retailers and services you know already or have been personally recommended to you.
•    Make sure you know the trader’s full address – especially if the company is based outside the UK. Don’t assume an internet company is based in the UK just because its web address has ‘uk’ in it – check out the physical address and phone number.
•    If the item or service is over £100 then consider paying by credit card this gives you some protection in the case of non-delivery or seizure by customs etc.
•    Look for websites that have a secure payment system (known as an encryption facility) – usually shown as a padlock image onscreen when you reach the payment stage.

Until very recently, there were rules that everybody stuck to when it came to clothing, especially in the workplace: men wore suits and women did too, unless they were secretaries, in which case they wore cardigans.  But now the clothing rules have broken down and in many places, new rules are being set and challenged.

In Singapore there is a law that says that ‘it is an offence to intentionally cause harassment, alarm or distress to another person through the use of threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour or display of writing, signs or visual representations’ – conviction could lead to a maximum fine of $5,000. While the law is not generally enforced, a complaint about vulgar or offensive images, graphics or text on a T-shirt could be considered as grounds for prosecution. Then there’s the Sedition Act: Chapter 290 of the Statutes of Singapore which says that anyone who produces, sells, circulates or imports publications and utters speech or produces words that incite hatred, contempt and disaffection towards the Government, as well as promoting ill will and hostility between different races or classes, is liable on conviction for a first offence to a fine of up to $5,000 or a maximum of three years’ jail.

Many young Singaporean students buy cheap T-shirts in Bangkok to wear on campus when they return home. Inverted crucifixes pentagrams and imagery that could be seen as misogynistic are all common on Heavy Metal T-shirts which are worn by students and could be subject to either of these laws. Recent publicity for the laws suggests that there may soon be a clamp down on clothing that doesn’t satisfy the national rules.

In the USA the Urban Outfitters retailer has also had a brush with controversy. A vest bearing the legend Eat Less in white lettering was being shown on their website, modelled by an extremely waiflike young woman – but only a couple of days after it went on sale, it was withdrawn without any explanation. It seems that a deluge of complaints from people with eating disorders and from the parents of young women who felt the slogan could lead to anorexic behaviour caused the disappearance of the item.