Ivanka Trump's Hypocrisy Extends To The Chinese Workers Who Produce Her Fashion Line

Yesterday, I wrote about the brazenness of Ivanka Trump’s hypocrisy in starting a “fund” or foundation to help empower female entrepreneurs while she is working in the White House as an adviser to the President. But Ivanka’s hypocrisy is actually deeper than the fact her father continually and baselessly accused Hillary Clinton of corruption because of her connection with the Clinton Foundation.

Ivanka Trump’s fashion line relies on Chinese workers who make the grand total of $62 per week. The apparel is manufactured at a Chinese factory, or sweatshop, for the company G-III Apparel Group Ltd. which has the license to make blouses, dresses, and other items for Ivanka’s fashion line. But, according to the Fair Labor Association, conditions in that Chinese factory were far from ideal. According to NBC News, the Fair Labor Association audit found two-dozen violations under the U.N. International Labor Organization, including that overtime work exceeded the legally required limit of 36 hours per month. Workers were found to have accumulated another 42 hours to as much as 82 hours per month in the past year. The audit said that the factory’s workers took home the equivalent of roughly $255 to $284 in U.S. dollars a month.”

If Ivanka was really interested in empowering women, she would ensure that her apparel line would not be using factories that allowed or even created these kinds of working conditions. But she doesn’t. Instead, she and her label are able to blame the whole affair on G-III who is licensed to produce her products. G-III for its part claims, “Our goal is to always attain and maintain the best labor conditions possible in these factories.” Apparently they did not succeed in the case of this factory.

Ivanka’ hypocrisy in this case is notable for who she is and what her father has done. But this kind of arrangement where popular fashion labels license the manufacturing to third parties and then absolve themselves from the conditions in which their products are made is rampant. Erik Loomis highlights the findings of the NGO Fashion Revolution, noting, “Few fashion brands are implementing measures to disclose details on their supply chain…Any ethical breaches within many of the world’s 100 leading brands may be undetected. Worse still, they may be undetectable…No brand scored higher than a 50% level of transparency. Such a score would require that brands publish ‘detailed information about assessment and remediation findings and detailed supplier lists from manufacturing right down to raw materials’.” The report says that few brands provide any information beyond the first tier of suppliers and only four brands are even making an attempt to ensure that workers throughout the entire supply chain are paid a living wage.

The fashion industry claims that tracing the full supply chain is almost impossible because it is so fragmented. But that’s just a convenient excuse for their willful blindness to how exactly their products get manufactured. As Loomis notes, we will never be able to change this kind of abuse unless we create some sort of legal framework where full information on the supply chain for each and every product is required. As long as companies can not only outsource the manufacturing but also outsource the responsibility for the workers doing the manufacturing, abuses will remain. And the fashion labels and Ivanka Trump can maintain their hypocrisy of innocence.