Shein suppliers still working 75-hour weeks, report says
bbc.com
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.
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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?