Zara, Uniqlo, Pick Profit Over Human Rights, Fuel Uyghur Forced Labor

By Sumedha Vemulakonda

Uyghur forced labor remains one of today’s largest humanitarian crises, and the fashion industry is intricately tied to its horrors. In December 2020, the Center for Global Policy issued a report on the extent of paramilitary control of the Xinjiang cotton-picking industry, and the direct beneficiary relationship between the industry and the Chinese government’s forced labor transfer scheme.

Cotton picking in China primarily takes place in the country’s Xinjiang region. For decades prior, cotton picking has been a migrant-dominated industry with the Han populations comprising most of the workforce. But in recent years, it has come to public attention that the Chinese government has implemented a coercive labor transfer scheme to substitute the Han cotton pickers with the country’s Uyghurs, a Turkic ethnic minority of China who have been forced into “reeducation camps” — de facto ethnic cleansing efforts on the part of the Chinese state.

The coercive labor transfer serves to drive down costs in a labor-intensive industry, where a significant amount of picking is still done by hand. As a part of this scheme, Uyghur workers have been moved out of “reeducation” camps into the cotton-picking industry which is controlled by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), a paramilitary organization overseeing cotton production in the region. The Xinjiang province provides around 85% of Chinese cotton, more than a majority of the country’s cotton supply. China, in turn, accounts for nearly 22% of the world’s cotton supply. It’s an undeniably huge global player — both in terms of supply and demand.

Read the full article here.