I Love Good Deals But Loathe the Price

I’m not sure if my girls actually listen to my unrehearsed rants or just tune them out. So when I told them that I no longer want to see a Shein package delivered to my house while I am still alive and breathing (so help me God!), they patted me on the back and didn’t even roll their eyes. 

If you haven’t heard of Shein, your daughters have. It is the world’s largest online-only fashion company. It generated 23 billion dollars in revenue last year and anticipates growing 40% this year. Shein is a Chinese company that produces dirt-cheap, super-trendy-but-poorly-made-clothing. Think fast food, but clothes. My girls love the $10 bathing suits and dresses. I taught them to be thrifty. So why wouldn’t they love it?

Last week I read that Shein (and Temu, another “Fast Fashion” company) have been under investigation for non-compliance with the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act. Shein denies the accusations, but the company exploits an import loophole that keeps them under the radar of any and all import regulations. Basically, their defense holds zero weight.

Should it matter?

My thoughts shuffle backward; I see an ironic mirror in American history. I wonder: Where did all the cotton from the slave plantations go? What about the sugar, the rice, the tobacco? These were cash crops. They were exported. Who bought them?  

In Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, he describes the role that New York City played in the South’s economy – both before and after the Civil War: “Money from New York bankers went on to finance every facet of the slave trade: New York businessmen built the ships, shipped the cotton, and produced the clothes that enslaved people wore….The financial capital in the North allowed slavery in the South to flourish.”

In fact, Smith writes that the mayor of New York City in 1861 proposed seceding from the Union in order to protect their profitable cotton trade with the Confederacy. 

I ask: Was the textile manufacturer, the banker, the woman in Boston buying school clothes for her children– was she complicit in American slavery?

We know the correct answer. We understand how supply and demand work.

Forced labor in America is of the past, we say. But is this just because we’ve outsourced it to other countries? *

I think about the Bangladeshi teen who made the clothes I’m wearing. The Mexican peasant who picked my strawberries. The Congolese child’s fingers which inched into a claustrophobic, treacherous mine to hack out the cobalt that runs the battery on this very laptop.

America holds 4% of the world’s population and 30% of the world’s wealth. How much of that wealth is directly connected to the suffering of others? How many of my purchases create the demand for forced labor?

I imagine myself as the woman in 1850s Boston, delighting over the lower prices of her children’s clothes. Cheaper than last year, perhaps. I see myself measuring out the sugar for my child’s birthday cake. I can’t fathom that I would be one who would approve of slavery, so perhaps a pang of guilt would strike me as I look at that sugar. But was that my problem? My daughter would need clothes. My son would need a birthday cake. I wouldn’t have control over the source. What other choice would I have? Yet, history holds that woman responsible.

So how will history judge me someday? More importantly, what does God think? 

Hear me out: I’m a fan of a free market economy; it’s one of the best ways to provide a staircase out of poverty. But when profit margin becomes a ruthless king, when corruption rules over justice, when vulnerable people are dehumanized for the sake of my comfort, something is dreadfully wrong.

Proverbs 16:8 says, “Better a little with righteousness than much gain with injustice.”

But in America, we’re all about much gain. And that’s from the top of the corporate ladder down to the average Walmart shopper. It’s all of us. It’s the air we breathe. It’s such an expected value that we rarely stop to think about the injustice on the other side of our good deals.

Am I overreacting? I realize that I cannot possibly know or control the supply chain for every product I buy. Most imported products are likely tainted by forced labor or corruption–and not just the cheap stuff. Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple have been accused of links to Uyghur forced labor. I wish I could just ignore it, but the truth keeps tapping me on the shoulder, compelling me to pay attention to it. 

At the very least, I should pay attention. I should care; speak up. I should evaluate my willingness to sacrifice a good deal if it means that fewer people will suffer. God help me; at the very least, I can keep Shein out of my house.

Related articles:
Swimming in the Stuff of America 
What If My Clothing Purchases are Contributing to Someone’s Else Poverty?
This Pandemic Can Help Us Identify With the With the World’s Poor

*Thank you to Jake Meador who helped me understand this in What Are Christians For?