In England, too, the #kledingarbeiders exploited. Boohoo's sweatshop suppliers: 'They only exploit us. They make huge profits and pay us peanuts “Our reporter found undercover at a factory in East Midlands that made clothes for the hugely profitable Boohoo and Nasty Gal labels and found almost no protective equipment and a wage of just £3.50 an hour

Vidhathri Matety went undercover to reveal practices in Leicester's clothing factories

My first full day of work on a dilapidated factory floor in the heart of Leicester's clothing factory started Thursday with the most vague promises: “Depending on how you work,” the boss told me, “we determine your salary.”

On day two, I got a rude awareness of the harsh reality of the conditions in the sweatshop endured by thousands of workers throughout the city, who last week were the first in England to be chosen because of local restrictions on the coronavirus.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boohoos-sweatshop-suppliers-they-only-exploit-us-they-make-huge-profits-and-pay-us-peanuts-lwj7d8fg2?mc_cid=6b80f50c54&mc_eid=66a316abca

The fashion world is under the spell of another scandal.

Last week, British newspaper The Sunday Times published an undercover study of a clothing factory in Leicester, England, which showed that workers are paid only £3.50, or 3.90 an hour. This while the minimum wage is around 9 pounds, or 10 euros. At the factory, clothing is made for the very popular British brand Boohoo among teenagers.

A few days earlier, the Labour Behind the Label campaign group also published a report stating that garment workers in several factories in Leicester were at high risk of infection with the coronavirus. Measures to prevent infection were hardly taken.

The city, which has a large South Asian immigrant population, has traditionally been a major producer of textiles. And this is not the first time that the poor working conditions have been denounced. In 2018, Financial Times journalist Sarah O'Connor wrote another big research story about abuses at Leicester factories, which also covered the factories that produce clothes for Boohoo. And a year earlier, the British television programme Dispatches also paid attention to low wages and long working days in the English clothing industry.

Surely you would expect that, especially in a country like England, something like that would be dealt with immediately. But no. The recommendations that the commissioned expert committee made to the government following Sarah O'Connor's play to deal with the excesses of the fastfashion industry were all rejected.

Some interesting threads appeared on Twitter, including the hollow phrase of factory controls as a solution to exploitation. Many brands, including Boohoo, point out that they regularly inspect their factories to detect and prevent abuses. But that blind reliance on factory checks and the idea that you, as a company, have covered all risks of human rights violations, is total nonsense. It's the lowest of the low-hanging fruit: pay some commercial inspection agency to go off the factories where you have your clothes made twice a year, and that's it.

Luke Smitham, expert in this field, wrote in a Twitter thread that audits for fashion brands are reassuring and relatively cheap, and that there are a few audit companies that dominate the industry and are under constant pressure to conduct inspections for as little money as possible. Some of them may be good and/or useful, but most often they are used as a form of defense when such abuses come to light.

Good topic to dive into.
Boohoo, what?

For those who have no idea what kind of company Boohoo is: it belongs to a growing group of so-called ultrafast fashion brands, including Fashion Nova, Missguided and PrettyLittleThing. I wrote this piece about it earlier. They sell almost exclusively online and focus on the Instagram and Tiktok generation who today wants to buy what her favorite influencers or celebrities wore yesterday.

The prices are absurd: for a dress you pay between five and fifteen euros, a bikini costs just as much — or little — as a cappuccino. Three euros.

These brands are able to go through the entire production process even faster than the well-known fast fashion brands such as H&M and ZARA. How? By keeping production close to home like Zara. Boohoo and Missguided produce their clothing mainly in Leicester, England.

Boohoo was until recently one of the fastest growing online fashion payers in England. The owner is the 55-year-old billionaire Mahmud Kamani. Because of the serious allegations, the company now seems to be sustained quite a bit of damage. One of Boohoo's largest shareholders has renounced almost all of its shares in the fashion company and criticized Boohoo's response to allegations of poor working conditions in its supply chain. Other lenders of the company are also under attack, writes Financial Times. Several retailers, including Zalando and Amazon, have indicated their intention to stop selling Boohoo clothing through their website.

Emy Demkes Correspondent #Kleding #Mode

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Emy Demkes Correspondent