Online shopping is something that everyone can participate in. There’s such a wide range of online retailers within reach, and you can find anything you want online. Online clothing shopping has become increasingly popular over the years. Getting cute clothing delivered to your door has never been easier. However, one large issue with online clothing shopping is high prices. It is not accessible to all people if not everyone can afford to do it. That’s where companies like Shein come in. Shein sells really cute, trendy clothing for extremely cheap prices, and who doesn’t like cute clothes for cheap prices? The issue that comes up is that it’s way too cheap. The amount of clothing you can get for a small price with added discounts at the checkout is utterly suspicious. Which raises the question, What’s going on? What exactly is Shein?
Shein is an online retail shop founded in Nanjing, China, in 2008. It was created by Chris Xu, who attended university in China and later went to work for a marketing company. After Xu learned about how much money you can make by selling cheap clothes at a markup, he started SheInside, now called SHEIN. Shein recently became the world’s largest online fashion site and the most downloaded fashion app. Shein has around 88.8 million active shoppers worldwide, with about 32.5 billion dollars in revenue in 2023. According to Forbes, all this traction to his website rakes in a lot of money for Xu, estimating his net worth at around 10 billion dollars. To make all of this money, you need to find ways to cut corners and reduce costs to keep those profits high.
Now a common thing we see in overseas companies is bad labor practices. But in my opinion, Shein seems to take horrible labor practices to the next level. Shein has had many investigations into their horrible labor practices by so many different news sources, such as Wired, Channel 4 (UK), Public Eye, and other journalists. To sum up everything I have found, it is awful and illegal. To start, Shein has their factory workers pulling many hours for little pay. At one of their clothing factories, workers worked over 75 hours a week, with one day off a month. However, according to Chinese law, a work week cannot exceed the maximum of 40 hours, with one day off per week. Overtime is allowed, at 36 hours per month. Doing some quick math, workers could work up to 49 hours a week for four weeks, with 4 days off per month. These workers worked 26 more hours than the legal limit, losing out on three of their required days off. Not to add on that they don’t get paid a wage, but get paid per clothing item they complete. These factories also do not follow fire safety protocols, having piles of completed clothing blocking the hallways and lacking windows and fire alarms. Safe to say, already very illegal. It has also been exposed that factories that make clothing for Shein use child labor. Last year it was found that two of their factories were signing on underage kids as laborers. That is the proven part. The part that is not yet proven is the forced labor allegations. There are many forced labor textile factories in China, where they detain civilians, keep them in camps, and make them work for little pay. There is no concrete evidence yet of Shein getting their clothes from these labor camps, but it would not be surprising if it were true.
Overall, Shein as a company is not good. None of their practices seem to be ethical or moral, and the higher-ups seem very negligent in everything that is going on in these smaller factories. The truth is that the Shein owners are responsible for all that happens there because if you take the profit from those practices, it is your fault. Blood money is not good money. This business is no longer beneficial to workers or consumers. My pure belief is that this company should be shut down because it has gone too far to fix it.