#labour exploitation

[novella-november]

content warning: contains descriptions of gore, animal death and violence, but no images are shown on screen, as an AI data worker describes the endless stream of images he was subjected to.

[jackoshadows]

Shein: Fast-fashion workers paid 3p per garment for 18-hour days, undercover filming in China reveals

It is the biggest fast-fashion company in the world, making billions of pounds by unveiling thousands of new designs on its addictive website every day and selling them cheaper than anyone else. Now the first undercover investigation into factories supplying Shein, the Chinese retailer loved by millions of young women in the UK and around the globe, has exposed the disturbing experiences of workers making its clothes. Garment manufacturers in China are often working up to 18 hours a day, being paid as little as 3p per item, with no weekends and only one day off per month, a Channel 4 team has found.

This treatment of workers – who are fined two thirds of their daily wage if they make a single mistake – breaks not only Shein's code of conduct for suppliers but also Chinese labour laws. The company says it will investigate. A woman using the false name of Mei secretly filmed inside two factories where she took on jobs producing the kinds of tops that British shoppers can buy for as little as £1.49. The footage has been shared with i ahead of Untold: Inside the Shein Machine, streaming on All4 from Monday. Women in one factory are found to be washing their hair during their lunch breaks, as they have so little spare time outside of their long shifts. A man who started work at 8am, but is filmed sitting shirtless at his sewing machine after midnight, says he will not finish until 2am or 3am because he needs to complete his batch

Woods says Shein is "head and shoulders" above other fashion brands in the number of "dark patterns" it uses online. "These are behaviours on the website that force you into actions that you might not choose yourself," he explains. "Data is making marketing like a loaded weapon." Shein was contacted for comment by the documentary makers but did not respond on this matter. Data published on 6 April by The Business of Fashion showed that in the year to date, Shein had launched 314,877 separate designs in the US market, compared to 18,343 in the same period by Boohoo. This relentless onslaught suggests customers have more than 3,000 new styles to potentially view every day

The contact arranged for "Mei", one of the journalists in his network, to infiltrate the Shein supply chain in Guangzhou, a south-eastern city with a population of 14 million. Having seen what she discovered, he says: "I have been doing investigative stories in China for 15, 16 years – still [they] exploit workers like dogs. Basically it's worse than years ago."

[raffaellopalandri]

Book of the Day - Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

Today’s Book of the Day is Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis, written in 2023 and published by Vintage Publishing. Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, politician, and activist, former finance minister in Greece during the 2015 debt crisis. He has an academic background rooted in political economy and game theory. His work is filled with moral clarity, often absent in…

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[ladymazzy]

Overseas nurses in the UK forced to pay out thousands if they want to quit jobs

Overseas nurses in the UK forced to pay out thousands if they want to quit jobs

Observer investigation uncovers NHS trusts and private care homes charging staff who leave to recoup recruitment costs

From the article:

'Nurses affected by the repayment terms, many of whom served on the frontline at the height of the pandemic, said they had been pushed into debt or locked into long-term payment agreements after leaving roles, even in cases of bullying or family emergencies. Others stay in jobs despite illness or poor working conditions as they fear they will be unable to repay, charities and unions said.

Parosha Chandran, a barrister and UN expert on human trafficking who helped shape the UK’s modern slavery laws, likened the clauses to “debt bondage” and called for them to be reviewed at the highest level. “This gives rise to very serious concerns about exploitation,” she said.Patricia Marquis, director for England at the Royal College of Nursing, said she was “very concerned” by a practice which flourished “in a climate of chronic understaffing”. The RCN was aware of some employers using punitive clauses which could result in workers being forced to pay thousands of pounds.

“We have also heard of cases in which employers try to frighten and intimidate staff with threats of deportation should they choose to work elsewhere,” Marquis said.

The UK recruits heavily from overseas in an effort to plug a shortage of 40,000 nurses in the NHS alone, with most recruits coming from the Philippines and India.

...In the private sector, the fees can be steeper. One nurse from Zimbabwe was told to pay £10,850 when she tried to leave her job at a care home, according to Unison. She said it was obvious the charges had been exaggerated, “but the manager said she would not give me a reference unless I paid the full amount”.

She said it was unfair for employers to pass recruitment costs on to workers, when hiring internationally can save them huge sums.

It costs between £10,000 and £12,000 to recruit an overseas nurse, but employers can save £18,500 in agency nurse costs in the first year alone, according to one estimate. By comparison, it takes three years to train a nurse in the UK and costs about £50,000 to £70,000. The government does not pay tuition fees, but provides maintenance grants of £5,000 a year.

Stuart Tuckwood, nursing officer at Unison, said the union knew of cases where nurses were “trapped by unethical contracts” – including a case where a nurse was required to pay £14,000 despite her salary being just £16,000...'

[sawasawako-archived]

... the myth of the self-reliant Singaporean, first, obscures a fact that feminist scholars have long pointed out—that dependence is part and parcel of being human. Outside of wage work, a great deal of labor occurs that goes onto sustaining meaningful lives and regenerating human societies. By making self-reliance via employment so central to social membership, we lose sight of the importance of other roles in the everyday lives of human beings and do injustice to the people, disproportionately women, who play these roles. Second, [this myth] obscures the fact that employment does not in fact lead to equal outcomes for all groups. Central to this is about the uneven exploitation of workers. The perpetuation of this myth throughout the capillaries of state institutions renders poverty a problem of failing individuals rather than adverse social conditions.

Teo You Yenn, Living with Myths in Singapore

[indizombie]

Greenhouse owners are now afraid of being prosecuted for facilitating illegal migration by hiring undocumented migrants. So the new targets for exploitation are EU citizens, who are willing to accept low wages because of the desperate situation in their home countries. Romanian women are paid three times less than the wage required by law, and most of them don’t have legal contracts.

Giuseppe Scifo, a union leader for CGIL, Italy’s largest union. Under Italian law, farm owners must provide seasonal workers with official contracts and a daily wage of €56 for an eight-hour day. Many of the women are rarely paid more than €20 a day.

[indizombie]

The legal minimum wage in Myanmar is 3,600 kyat (£2.12) for an eight-hour day – equivalent to 26p an hour. Workers in all the factories investigated worked six-day weeks. Labour NGOs argued when the minimum wage was set that a minimum of 6,000 kyat a day was required for a basic standard of living. All the factories investigated employed workers below the age of 18. Several workers at factories supplying Lonsdale, New Look, H&M and Muji stated that they had started work at the age of 14. A worker at another factory told researchers: “When buyers come into the factory the child workers are being told not to come to work that day.”

Gethin Chamberlain, 'How high street clothes were made by children in Myanmar for 13p an hour', The Guardian

[bryanharryrombough]