Fashion influencers with big followings on social media came under fire this week for praising the supposedly humane working conditions of a Chinese clothing brand notorious for being a sweatshop after visiting its factory for a documentary.
Dani Carbonari, AuJene Butler, Marina Saavedra, and Destene Sudduth toured several Shein facilities in Guangzhou, China, and recorded happy, healthy employees there for a film.
In April, a group of members of Congress, including leaders of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, warned the Department of Homeland Security in a letter that increasingly popular Chinese e-commerce apps could enable Uyghur forced-labor imports in violation of federal law.
The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, enacted at the end of 2021, blocks imports from China’s Xinjiang region with the assumption that they were produced using forced labor and are therefore inadmissible, based on evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights violations there. Those atrocities have been recognized by the U.S. and other governments, the U.N., and numerous human-rights groups.
Shein’s viral shopping app came under scrutiny as one of the possible loopholes that importers could exploit to circumvent the prohibition on those imports. The brand has also faced allegations of mistreating workers in their factories, including meager pay, dangerous working conditions, and having toxic materials in their clothing, the Washington Times noted.
In a video on TikTok, another social media platform compromised by its link to Beijing, Carbonari dispelled many of the accusations against Shein as “rumors,” the publication noted. Carbonari called one factory the “Shein innovation center.”
The influencers also gave a very positive review of the working environment in the factories and noticed that the workers seemed “chill,” the outlet said. Carbonari said she was “excited and impressed to see the working conditions” and that Shein is a “developed and complex” operation. Employees they interviewed were shocked by the allegations that Shein uses child labor.
“I think my biggest takeaway from this trip was to be an independent thinker, get the facts, and see it with your own two eyes,” she said, according to the Cut. “There’s a narrative fed to us in the U.S. and I’m one that always likes to be open-minded and seek the truth. So I’m grateful for that about myself, and I hope the same for you guys.”
In 2022, U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 sent an undercover worker to videotape inside two factories in Guangzhou that produce clothing for Shein to reveal the working conditions there. The outlet discovered in one factory that workers earn a base salary of 4,000 yuan per month, which translates to about $556, to manufacture 500 articles of clothing per day. In another factory, employees earned the equivalent of four cents per item they made. Workers in both facilities worked up to 18-hour days, with only one day off each month.
A chorus of commenters responded to the videos, calling the influencers tone-deaf and suggesting that the company purposefully obscured the less pretty sides of the factory from their view. Carbonari responded in a video that’s since been deleted, claiming that the criticism of her and her peers was unjustified.
“I know who I am, I know exactly what I’m doing, and to be a pioneer, you gotta take a lot of s*** sometimes,” she said.