Number of the Day
The Fashion Industry’s Ties to Forced Labor, by the Numbers
Why brands like Adidas and Calvin Klein are cutting ties with suppliers in China
One in five: That’s roughly how many cotton garments in the global apparel market include cotton or yarn that can be traced back to forced labor in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, according to End Uyghur Forced Labor, a human rights coalition.
Xinjiang accounts for one-fifth of the world’s cotton production, and roughly a third of China’s cotton is produced by a paramilitary group known as Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which the U.S. Treasury Department issued sanctions against in July. The sanctions, which take effect next month, were issued in response to human rights abuses connected to China’s policies towards its Uyghur population. China has put an estimated 1 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities into reeducation camps over the past three years, and it continues to build what appear to be detention centers in Xinjiang. A March report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) found that between 2017 and 2019, at least 80,000 “graduates” of the reeducation camps had been sent to work in factories across China, where they found evidence of forced labor.
