Author
Executive Summary
This report is a collaboration with Students for International Labor Solidarity and was produced in response to complaints raised by workers concerning serious and pervasive violations of labor rights in the supply chain of REI, the largest specialty outdoor retailer and consumer cooperative in the United States. REI’s CEO Eric Artz assures co-op members that REI is “a different kind of company… One where people care about each other as human beings,” but what we find is that REI sources from factories in Asia and Central America characterized by serious systemic human rights abuses that warrant immediate attention. These abuses include forced labor, subpoverty wages, and intense retaliation against workers for attempts to unionize – all violations of REI’s labor code. REI’s supply chain workers face a high risk of exposure to egregious labor rights abuses with no reliable avenue for recourse or remedy.
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“It is hard to cover my family’s expenses with the wages that I earn. We can’t buy all the food we need and sometimes we miss a payment of our utility bills. I don’t have enough to buy clothes and shoes. The school asks parents to buy things for our children, but I can’t buy what they need because it would mean that we wouldn’t eat. My refrigerator doesn’t work but I don’t have enough money to buy a new one. I never get to take my children to do anything fun outdoors. The money is never enough.”
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The violations we uncovered at REI’s supplier factories are merely the tip of a very large iceberg. It is extraordinary that our limited research identified so many violations at REI supplier factories, especially when workers are generally terrified to report publicly on rights violations they experience for fear of being retaliated against by their employer. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the violations described in this report are only a very small portion of the actual extent of labor abuses in REI’s global supply chain.
In this report we will detail these violations and examine REI’s supplier relationships and transparency efforts and conduct a risk assessment of the countries where REI products are made.
Key findings:
- Poor working conditions and violations of workers’ rights are widespread at REI’s supplier factories. An examination of publicly available reporting and worker testimonies of working conditions at more than a dozen factories in REI’s modestly sized supply chain shows repeated violations of REI’s Factory Code of Conduct, national law, and international labor standards. These include:
- Forced labor: Migrant workers from Thailand and Vietnam employed at a bicycle factory in Taiwan reported: paying exorbitant recruitment and “anti-escape” fees, forcing them to take out usurious loans and leaving them in debt bondage; inhumane, overcrowded, and unsanitary living conditions; and punitive management practices, including threats of deportation.
- Forced overtime: At a facility in China that made fabric for REI, a third of the workforce reported such a relentless work schedule that most months they did not receive a single day off.
- Subpoverty wages: Across the factories from which we analyzed reports of working conditions and worker testimonies, workers at REI suppliers generally reported receiving no more than minimum wage, excluding overtime. Workers making REI-branded goods report struggling to feed themselves and their families.
- Discrimination against pregnant and postpartum women: In El Salvador an apparel supplier fired a woman who was pregnant and another after she returned from maternity leave, in violation of Salvadoran law. In Cambodia an REI apparel supplier violated Cambodian law concerning payment of maternity leave.
- Use of precarious contracts: A factory in the Philippines that manufactured backpacks and trail seats for REI refused to grant workers regular contracts, instead hiring them on repeated short-term contracts, making their employment highly precarious and denying them benefits for which they would otherwise be eligible.
- Retaliation against workers seeking an end to labor abuses: In several countries – Cambodia, El Salvador, Indonesia, and the Philippines – trade unionists reported experiencing intimidation, threats, or illegal firings at factories producing for REI. REI’s top supplier countries are China and Vietnam, two nations where the governments ban independent union organizing and any worker who does so is thrown in jail.
- REI’s own reporting acknowledged widespread and even worsening violations for a period of several years, although REI provided no transparency as to specific countries or factory names. After reporting a particularly high increase in health and safety violations detected in 2013, REI simply stopped reporting on the levels and types of noncompliances with its Factory Code of Conduct that its auditors found.
- Despite uncovering numerous workers’ rights violations through its own supply chain audits, REI never reported on successfully securing any specific remedy for the workers facing these egregious labor rights abuses.
- While we could not identify a single instance in which REI effectively intervened in support of workers experiencing labor rights abuses, we did identify multiple cases in which other buyers sourcing from the same supplier intervened appropriately. This suggests that REI was a freerider on remedies driven by other brands.
- REI maintains an ongoing partnership with a corporation that is an infamous corporate criminal, listing it as a “strategic material supplier.” The corporation, Formosa, was responsible for: releasing toxic chemicals into the sea causing Vietnam’s deadliest marine life disaster; killing 14 workers in Vietnam and three in Taiwan in two collapses of scaffolding; a fire at a plastics factory in Illinois that killed five people; and soil and water contamination in Texas throughout two decades. Dozens of imprisoned journalists and environmental activists in Vietnam have lost many years of their lives simply because they tried to speak publicly about Formosa’s corporate malfeasance.
- REI frequently shifts its production from factory to factory, favoring flexibility over sustainability. In less than five years, REI departed 51% of its supplier factories, abandoning tens of thousands of workers at more than half its supplier base. Such irresponsible short-term relationships with suppliers contribute to a high level of precarity for workers, downward pressure on wages, a rise in workers' rights violations, and repression against trade unionists.
- REI misrepresents how much of its production is in the US. Of the seven entities with US addresses disclosed by REI in its most recent REI Co-op Brands Factory List, only three are factories and the others are corporate offices, research and development offices, or screen printers. REI advertises domestic production with a dedicated “Made in the USA” webpage, but not all products featured on the page are made in the US. In at least one instance, REI is advertising a product as US-made on that page but the same product stocked in an REI store is labeled as made in China.
- REI primarily sources from countries where human rights and labor rights violations are rampant, where workers are paid unlivable wages, and where there is shrinking civil society space. In particular, these countries are Cambodia, China, El Salvador, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam.
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“I support my mother and my daughter on my salary. I do as much overtime as I can because I can’t live on my regular wage. We can’t afford to eat chicken or beef. We try to limit our food as much as possible so that we can try to pay for my mother’s medical treatments.”
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