Workers for some suppliers of Chinese fast fashion giant Shein are still working 75 hours a week, despite the company promising to improve conditions, a report suggests.
A new investigation by Swiss advocacy group Public Eye has followed up on its 2021 report, which found a number of staff across six sites in Guangzhou were doing excessive overtime.
According to the group, who interviewed 13 employees from six factories in China supplying Shein for its latest investigation, excessive overtime was still common for many workers.
Yes, how do you think fast fashion functions? You can’t have dirt cheap clothing without exploiting someone.
This is how it works now, but it doesn’t have to. Look on AliExpress and you’ll see how cheap these clothes actually are. You can buy a decent collared shirt for $5 - $10. And that’s the consumer price, not wholesale. It’s actually incredibly cheap and fast to make clothes.
The producers could cut hours in half and still make good money. Their buyers are marking the items up like 80%. Essentially you are paying for the brand and the rent in the store in the West.
The reasons why clothes are so cheap are workers getting paid close to nothing and a complete disregard for the environment, health and safety.
But not why our clothes are so “cheap”. If you have never checked AliBaba, you just can’t understand what kind of price points we are talking about. Printed T-shirts for $0.39. Hot pots for $3.70. USB hubs with HDMI out for $2.90. The list goes on and on.
A $10 T-shirt, 25x more than wholesale, could go up to $10.80 and you would hardly notice, but that would mean the worker could be paid three times as much for making it. Instead, the worker gets paid nothing, the manufacturer gets paid peanuts, and whoever is reselling them to us takes in 90% of the profit.
They’re not paid that much, but these are decent jobs compared to subsistence farming in rural China. These people are supporting their families. I believe clothing manufacturing is actually moving to Vietnam because China is getting more expensive.
Working a modern sewing machine is detail oriented but not backbreaking labor. Rice farming is probably worse. It just doesn’t take that long to make a shirt nowadays, and the cotton is relatively cheap. If a shirt can be made in 10 minutes or less, why should it be expensive?
Lol, any excuse to justify exploitation huh?
Even then, fuck fast fashion.
The trick with AliExpress is that the delivery chain is cut short by a lot. Every single stage costs a lot of money.
75 hours? What’s with these rookie numbers?! What happened to the good old days of Chinese sweatshops where people worked 14 hours, 7 days per week? What’s next, unions?!
They’ve got you covered :
However, an employee who has worked at sewing machines for 20 years told Public Eye: “I work every day from 8 in the morning to 10.30 at night and take one day off each month. I can’t afford any more days off because it costs too much."
There is no need for a union when the state is cOMunISt
Besides, what would a union even be for? Since the company is owned by the workers (because it is owned by the state) any union action would just harm the workers themselves! We don’t want to encourage economic self-harm, do we?
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