"SHEIN’s Commitment to Sustainability and Fair Practices: A Response to Recent Media Reports" 14 May 2024

On May 13, the Swiss NGO Public Eye published a report about the working conditions at the factories of some of SHEIN’s third-party suppliers.

While we do not recognise many of the allegations in this report, the discussion on working hours and wages raised by Public Eye is important to us, and we have made significant progress on enhancing conditions across our ecosystem...

SHEIN is investing tens of millions of dollars in strengthening governance and compliance across our supply chain, as well as in empowering our suppliers to build more successful and responsible businesses, and we will continue to make substantial investments in these areas...

We are actively working to improve our suppliers’ practices, including ensuring that hours worked are voluntary and that workers are compensated fairly for what they do, and also recognize the importance of industry collaboration to ensure continuous improvement and progress in this area...

As part of our efforts to ensure that workers are compensated fairly for the work that they do, and that they earn a decent wage, we regularly engage third-party agencies including Bureau Veritas, Intertek, Openview, SGS and TÜV Rheinland to conduct salary audits on our suppliers. Research conducted by our third-party auditors across more than 4000 workers at SHEIN supplier facilities in China has found that they earn basic salaries (before overtime) that are on average, two times higher than the local minimum wage, and more than 50% higher than the Global Living Wage Coalition’s 2022 living wage for Shenzhen.

SHEIN has also set up anonymous grievance channels where workers at any of SHEIN’s supplier partner facilities can report issues, including those concerning their wages and working hours...