Supermarket giant Lidl has reportedly drawn sharp criticism from UK-based newspaper The Guardian for selling Bangladesh-produced garments at prices that were allegedly too low, indicating towards exploitation of cheap labour in the country.
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According to The Guardian’s report published recently, the German retail giant has reportedly launched a 58-piece denim collection, which includes women’s jeggings, priced under 6 pounds (around US$8.60) a piece. The report went on to add that the reason the retailer could sell them at such cheap rates is because they were made in Bangladesh, where the minimum hourly wage for a garment worker is 23 pence, or about 48 pounds a month (roughly US $69).
The report further broke down the price of a pair of Lidl’s Bangladeshi-made jeggings to an estimate that a minimum wage worker would be paid somewhere in the range of 2 pence and 9 pence for each pair, or between US $0.03 and US $0.13.
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“Times are tough. Customers demand the cheapest possible clothes. Lidl’s success is built on this,” The Guardian report underlined, noting that the company did not pick Dhaka, because of the high quality of its garments, but rather the bargain-basement prices of its labour force.
It may be mentioned here that Lidl, owned by Germany’s third-richest man Dieter Schwarz, reportedly purchased 251 million pieces of apparel from Bangladesh in 2015.
