Shein and controversy go hand in hand. After all, you don’t get to be worth more than H&M and SpaceX without breaking a few ethical rules (allegedly).
What’s the latest on Shein’s happenings? According to a recent investigation by Channel4 and the i newspaper, it’s not good, and the mistreatment spotlight is on the workers.
Faster fashion by Shein
If fast fashion were a marathon, Shein is doing laps around its competitors.
Shein doesn’t just use any old fast fashion business model. According to critics, including The Conscious Style’s Elizabeth Joy, Shein is the fastest of the lot. Where other giants in fast fashion might produce new styles weekly or even a few times a week, Shein races ahead with a daily output of new looks.
To get a better image of how much clothing that actually is, imagine if you walked into a store, and the next day the entire store had all new stock. You go back the next day and it’s changed again, yet all the previous products are still available, and still being produced. You might think to yourself ‘how on earth do they keep switching everything up?’
The answer of course, is a heavy focus on production.
Taking into account that the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of global CO2 emissions each year, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, mass-producing clothes is definitely not helping the future’s environmental goals.
As Marthe de Ferrer puts it, if a product on a small scape is still contributing to carbon emissions and waste, then think about 700-1000 new items a day.
And the workers who are part of this mass-production machine are seen, it seems, in the same light as Shein appears to value the Earth – minimally.
Inside the Shein Machine
The undercover investigation dubbed Untold: Inside the Shein Machine saw a woman gain access to two of the factories in the best way possible – by getting employed. Under a fake name, the insider shares that she was able to capture what life inside ‘Shein’s Machine’ is actually like by ‘working’ in two factories.
According to the most recent insider, the deal at Shein is simple. 7 days a week, 18 hours a day and the salary earns around two US cents per item (or just under 4 cents at the second factory).
Thought your working hours were tough? The investigation claims that workers can only get one day off a month, and that Sundays are simply ‘not a thing’ there.
Over and above ‘luxuries’ like Sundays, it appears that the time crunch extends so sorely that some women have to wash their hair on lunch breaks as they have no other time in their day, per ChargedRetail.
The overall cost for a craft that damages not only the Earth, but the people who undertake the task. The investigation alleges that creating Shein’s wares will earn workers a base salary of 4000 yuan in a month/ $556/ R 10 084,57, where they must make 500 pieces of clothing a day according to the doc.
As for margins of error, the cost is high. The investigation alleges that if employees should make any mistakes, they’re subject to fines that can take up to two-thirds of their wages.
This isn’t Shein’s first rodeo with unethical working practices
What we know of the documentary so far only builds on suspicions Shein’s already associated with.
Last year, the BBC reported that workers were doing excessive overtime after the Public Eye visited 17 factories supplying Shein and its parent company, Zoetop.
What should we do with all this information?
According to Iman Amrani, the documentary’s presenter, what companies like Shein are really competing on is production and price. The quality of Shein, Pretty Little Thing, Boohoo and Missguided rarely differs, as anyone who’s shopped these items before will know.
When we think about where fashion is going, and how more and more brands are opting to slow down (even Pick n Pay released a sustainable collection) we need to consider our role in feeding the consumption monster.
Is having new looks for a cheaper price worth it anymore? When something will only last you a few wears anyway, what you’re actually paying for is the trailer instead of the whole movie.
What the latest claims against Shein tell us is that the cost we’re paying (or the lack thereof) is actually a tall order. It’s far more costly to work at Shein than we ever imagined, and the more we consume, the more the Shein Machine does too.
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Feature Image: @sheinx__official/Instagram
