Whats the problem? There's higher risk of exploitation.
Low scores, high concerns
Our friends at Baptist World Aid, recently released their 2024 Ethical Fashion Report. This renowned report surveys and scores 120 of the world’s largest fashion brands on the policies and practices they have in place to protect workers in their supply chains and mitigate their environmental impacts. We combed through this year’s report to see how some of New Zealand’s most popular ultra-fast fashion brands fared.
The average score across the brands assessed was 31 out of 100. This year, Temu scored a 0*. Temu’s rock bottom score is a result of its striking lack of transparency and its decision not to provide any further evidence to the Ethical Fashion Report’s researchers.
In the fashion industry, transparency is the new standard. Opaque supply chains are a phenomenon relegated to the past. If brands do not disclose, or are unwilling to disclose, any information publicly it becomes impossible to determine whether the company is taking any steps to protect the wellbeing of the workers in its supply chains. Temu’s current refusal to embrace transparency is outdated in an industry where consumers increasingly expect accountability and greater openness from businesses.
We were also interested to see how another ultra-fast fashion giant, Shein, would score in this year’s report. We’d read through all 62 pages of their recent sustainability report, and were struck by how much it sounds like they’re doing all the right things. Shein’s score of 20 out of 100 confirms our suspicions: whilst they align with the industry average when it comes to having the basic policies and guidelines in place for their suppliers; they lag significantly behind in key human rights and worker empowerment measures that deliver meaningful change for workers. So, in short, Shein has taken enough of the first steps towards addressing worker exploitation to sit just below the industry average; but has stopped well short of making the transformational change required to make life better for a worker in their supply chain.
Cheap deals, hidden costs
While higher prices are not a guarantee an item has been produced ethically, super low prices should raise a red flag for an informed shopper.
A lot goes into making a cotton T-shirt.
First, the cotton needs to be grown, and the farmer needs to be paid. That cotton then needs to be spun into yarn and woven into fabric, and later dyed. All three of these processes involve workers with different expertise and skills, likely take place in different factories, and sometimes even in different countries. The fabric is then sewn into a T-shirt somewhere else, maybe it’s embellished or embroidered in some way. A retailer then sells it, and it’s then packaged and shipped to New Zealand. The selling price of this t-shirt needs to cover all the costs in the process we've just described and will include a markup for the retailer. Can this entire process really cost less than $6?
We can be fairly confident, that for such a low price, some or many of those workers along the supply chain can’t have been paid fairly for their labour or that they worked under degrading or dangerous conditions.
Shein and PDD Holdings (Temu’s parent company) have both been accused of extreme overtime in their supply chains. In the case of PDD Holdings, workers have spoken of being required to work 380 hours per month – that's 12 hours a day - well above China’s legal maximum.ii
When Public Eye sent an investigative journalist into factories that produce clothing for Shein, they interviewed employees who were working 75 hours per week.iii While working additional hours may be a choice made by workers themselves, very low baseline salaries means that exhaustive hours are often needed to support their families.