“We are barely surviving,” says Hussain, a garment worker at a factory in Pakistan. “I live in a two-room house with my five children. I hardly manage my utilities on my salary, and we are living hand to mouth. The wages are not enough.”
Hussain is one of hundreds of Pakistani workers making clothes for small-scale Amazon sellers. His is one of countless stories of alleged abusive labour practices uncovered in a new report from campaign group Labour Behind the Label [LBL], which spotlights the lack of accountability on online fashion marketplaces and “highlights significant risk of hidden exploitation in Amazon seller supply chains for fashion.”
LBL carried out a months-long investigation and traced items sold by three sellers – Chums, Ice Cool Fashion, and A2Z 4 Kids – on Amazon Marketplace back to factories in Pakistan. Through interviews with 40 workers, its researchers compiled a litany of alleged labour abuses. Workers reported not being paid national minimum wages and working excessive hours with forced overtime. Workers at a factory in Faisalabad told investigators that in addition to their regular hours of 8am to 5:30pm, they are regularly required to work for an additional two to four hours. In these circumstances, Pakistani law requires companies to pay double, however the workers alleged they were paid a single rate.
Ahsan Shah is a worker at one of the factories. He is paid per item – known as a piece rate – which makes his employment and earnings precarious. He told the LBL researchers that he struggles to get by and provide for his family on his meagre earnings. “I cannot afford to provide proper education for my children,” he told researchers. “The product we make sells for $17, but workers are paid only a tiny fraction of this amount.” Another worker, named as Abdul, has a reported earning of just £86 a month and to support a family of seven. “We can only afford the cheapest possible food instead of having nutritious meals, including no milk, meat, fruits, salad,” he said. The family has even avoided weddings because they cannot afford smart clothes to attend.
Amazon responded to the LBL report by launching an investigation and saying it takes claims like these “incredibly seriously”. A spokesman said: “Providing safe, healthy and fair working conditions is a requirement of doing business with Amazon in every country where we operate.” Sellers need to meet Amazon’s standards, she added, even when those go further than the law.
None of the three brands highlighted responded to a request for comment from LBL. However, a manager at one of the factories in Pakistan denied the allegations to The i Paper. He said: “We will face the authorities, we will fight, and we will prove that we are innocent.”
The brands highlighted by LBL in the report aren’t a huge cross section of Gen Z’s shopping habits – one is a former catalogue sales business, another makes clothes for kids. However, as more and more young people shop on online marketplaces, it can be harder to know exactly where your clothes are coming from, and that’s a problem that too few of us are aware of. Unfortunately, these case studies could just be the tip of the iceberg.
Sixty per cent of Gen Z’s consumer spending in 2024 was conducted online, according to retail analysts Mintel. In the four years before that the proportion of shoppers buying from online-only marketplaces nearly doubled. A survey last year suggested that 93 per cent of us had bought at least one item online in the previous three months. Young shoppers rely on the internet even more: according to a survey this year by AMZScout, the 18 to 24 age group accounted for 47 per cent of online shoppers globally.
Young people are also more likely to shop for clothes on the internet. And a growing number of online-only marketplaces have launched to cater to that. Amazon is the largest, with an estimated 500,000 third-party brands selling fashion on its site. But others have emerged in the past few years, particularly from Asia. Shein launched its marketplace for third-party brands in 2023, while Temu is a popular marketplace for other brands. Even long-established retailers have gotten in on the act: Next has launched an online marketplace for third-party companies, for example, and currently lists products from nearly 800 sellers.
Campaigners warn that this expanded reach for small brands comes with a rising risk of supply chain exploitation. Of course, high street retailers have faced their fair share of allegations of abuse, but they can mostly be trusted to at least have a modern slavery policy in place. This might not be the case for smaller brands selling via Amazon, who may never have been asked about their forced labour policies, says Anne Bryher, policy lead for LBL. “We’re creating impunity for tiny fashion brands who have no policies and hidden suppliers,” she explains. “But in a sense, we’re not laying this at the door of the sellers. The fact is that Amazon has deliberately set up a business model that is creating this risk but is not addressing it.”
It shouldn’t be up to the consumer to have to dig into all of the human rights implications of each of the different brands and products. Consumption needs to be fair at point of sale
In response to these claims (though Amazon did not respond to LBL’s request for more info on its third party supply chains), LBL’s report indicates that Amazon sellers have to sign a ‘Business Solutions Agreement’ that includes the phrasing “no Unit is or will be produced or manufactured, in whole or in part, by child labor or by convict or forced labor.” And in its Modern Slavery Risk Assessment for 2023, Amazon does state that, “if we have reason to suspect products do not meet our Standards, we may request evidence of due diligence from selling partners to demonstrate products were manufactured in accordance with our Standards.”
So what’s next for third party sellers? Christie Miedema, a campaign coordinator at the Clean Clothes Campaign, says smaller brands are “relatively immune to public campaigning as they will find an audience to buy them on platforms like Amazon”. This “makes it harder to get justice for supply chain violations”.
This matters for shoppers as they can’t be sure where their clothes are coming from. But Bryher says that it shouldn’t be left up to individual consumers to force brands to do the right thing. A huge company like Amazon should be willing to use its influential position and introduce policies that all its brands have to follow, giving shoppers more peace of mind. “We’ve always taken the line that it’s about companies needing to be able to make profit without exploitation,” she adds. “It shouldn’t be up to the consumer to have to dig into all of the human rights implications of each of the different brands and products. Consumption needs to be fair at point of sale.”
As well as Amazon, there are several other major players in the marketplace ecosystem. Shein requires its marketplace sellers to comply with its code of conduct, which “strictly prohibits forced labour and child labour” and requires minimum standards wages and working hours. It has previously admitted to finding abuses in its own supply chain and, it says, acted on them.
Temu says that new sellers undergo a “comprehensive” vetting process and must agree to “regular monitoring”. But an investigation by Bloomberg and the LA Times linked 10 products on its site to the Xinjiang region of China. The US government has banned any imports from the region over forced labour concerns. Temu did not reply to a request for further explanation from Bloomberg of how it acts on these policies.
Bryher says retailers should put in place strong policies based around visibility of supply chains, auditing capacity and collaboration. “We would look to Amazon to be the ones who are trying to set an example,” she adds. “They should be, given their power within the world of marketplaces. They should be trying to set an example for what responsible retail looks like and how human rights should be upheld.”
Until then, what can you do? Reputable retailers should list their suppliers online. While you can’t go and check them out yourself, you can look them up online to see if they have been criticised by any human rights groups or unions. You can also check the website of a brand you want to buy from and see if they have a modern slavery policy, and what that policy is. And if they don’t have one, or you don’t think it’s up to scratch, why not let them know?
