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.
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?!
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?
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."
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