This article is part of ourEconomy's 'Decolonising the economy' series.
Fast Retailing, the Japanese company behind the clothing brand Uniqlo, is “the second-largest apparel maker by market value” behind the Spanish company Zara. In 2015, the operating profits of Uniqlo Japan alone experienced a 10.3 percent growth. In 2018, the firm’s shares “surged more than 75 percent over the past year,” and the wealth of the company’s CEO, Tadashi Yanai, had reached $25.4 billion—double the amount in 2016. All this was due to “steady expansion in overseas markets and endorsement deals with tennis star Roger Federer and golfer Adam Scott.” Uniqlo indeed has great ambitions, positioning itself as an “influential player in the fashion industry,” face to face with its established European competitors.
Within the same period, two thousand Indonesian workers that sewed Uniqlo products were laid off with unpaid wages and no severance payments. Their employer, an Indonesian supplier for Uniqlo, went bankrupt in 2015, reportedly after the multinational stopped its orders due to “quality issues.” The supplier was also reported to have engaged in labor violations, including unpaid overtime and union busting. These workers demanded that Uniqlo take responsibility and pay the $5.5 million debt of back wages and severance payments. In November 2018, Uniqlo agreed to meet with workers’ representatives only to reject any form of concrete responsibility. In contrast to the increased wealth of Yanai and deals secured by Federer and Scott, the workers got nothing. The reason for the refusal is a classic one: Uniqlo claimed that it had no legal obligation to fulfill these workers’ demands, since the fault was that of its supplier, and not its own.
