The factory workers suffering long hours to clothe Kiwis

Sunday, 26 October 2025

“Anything over 80 … I mean I'm not justifying this… anything over 84 hours for us is critical.”

Phil Cumming is the Warehouse Group’s general manager for sustainability overseeing the Red Sheds’ ethical sourcing programme.

The retailer operates in a world where consumer goods are generally made in factories in places like China and Bangladesh, where workers do what Kiwis would consider intolerably long working hours for pittance wages.

In some instances, the hours worked in such factories would even have startled British Victorian workers of 150 years ago, who won the 10-hour working day in 1847.

The Warehouse audits its tier one supplier factories in a bid to keep abusive working hours out of its supply chain, but its work hour bottom lines are still beyond what most Kiwis would tolerate.

Its ethical sourcing policy says regular working hours, excluding overtime, should not exceed 40 or 48 hours per week, and should enable workers to meet their basic needs, and provide some discretionary income.

“Anything between 70 and 84 is major,” Cumming says, discussing the retailer’s system for classing working hours of suppliers.

“Sixty, which is where you should be roughly, is classed as moderate, anything less than 60 is classed as minor.”

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) defines “normal” working hours as eight hours a day for no more than six days a week, and normal overtime not exceeding more than four hours a day, and a “normal” working week not exceeding 48 hours a week.

But these are aspirational hours, and lowly paid workers in many factories need to work longer hours to earn enough to support their families, says Tearfund’s Claire Gray, an expert in supply chain worker exploitation.

“We have created an economic system where it’s been OK to externalise certain costs, to externalise the human and the environmental costs,” she says.

“Now, we are trying to retrofit a solution to the system we have created.”

Gray is referring to modern slavery and climate reporting laws in places like Australia, the UK and the European Union, though New Zealand has yet to pass matching anti-slavery laws.

These laws require large retailers to know their supply chains, and to identify abuses of workers that amount to modern slavery, a term which covers a variety of extremely serious practices, including forced and bonded labour.

Big trans-Tasman retailers, and some New Zealand-only retailers, like The Warehouse, Woolworths, Wesfarmers (Kmart and Bunnings) and Briscoe Group all publish “sustainability” reports, and have ethical sourcing policies.

But it’s no easy task for them.

Their supply chains often involve thousands, if not tens of thousands of factories, and those factories have factories supplying them, and those factories have suppliers.

Wesfarmers reported it had nearly 25,000 factories, of which 2996 are in its ethical sourcing programme, of which 1813 were “monitored” in the past year.

Large retailers have had to invest in getting to know their own supply chains, and try to identify and out worker abuse. Increasingly, they are publishing their findings in annual sustainability reports.

Some, like the Warehouse, have been publishing sustainability reports for more than a decade. Others, like Briscoe Group, are newer to the game. It has only had an ethical sourcing policy since 2023. Farmers does not report publicly on its supply chain.

References in published sustainability reports to supplier factory working hours are few though some, like The Warehouse, reveal more.

“According to data from our China factory audits in 2023 average weekly working hours were 63 hours,” The Warehouse said in its 2023 Ethical Sourcing report. “In a much wider sample of audits undertaken for multiple international brands working hour averages for China and Bangladesh respectively were 58 and 64 hours per week.”

Such hours are not good for human health.

A recent study of overworked South Korean medical workers doing 52 or more hours per week displayed significant changes in brain regions associated with executive function and emotional regulation.

ILO and World Health Organisation research in 2012 found excessive work hours were contributing to thousand of deaths a year. It estimated that in 2016, just under three-quarters of a million people died early as a result of having worked at least 55 hours a week with older, male workers the most affected.

Such hours brought higher risk of heart attack, diabetes and stroke, reduced sleep and higher likelihood of damaging lifestyle features like poor diets.

Large retailers set expectations for suppliers.

Woolworths sets a target limit for regular working hours for employees of suppliers of 48 hours a week, unless local laws allow longer hours. Overtime can be up to 12 hours per week up to a total of 60 hours a month, unless local laws allow longer.

However, the Warehouse in its 2023 ethical sourcing report was blunt about such policies: “Brand codes that outwardly attempt to enforce weekly working hour limits such as ‘less than sixty’ or ‘less than forty-eight’ are a primary driver of the falsified working hour and payroll data endemic in many audit schemes.“

It went on: “Unless local governments decide to strictly enforce this element of their labour law, change is unlikely. Production worker earning aspirations, and competitive labour markets continue to dictate working hour norms – even where wages have grown significantly.”

It isn’t only wages that are low compared to the cost of living that can drive long work hours.

Disruptive events like civil unrest could do so too, putting factories under pressure to make up for lost hours. That happened when Bangladesh descended into civil unrest, and factories temporarily shut, says Cumming.

Other causes include inefficient factories and poor managers.

Those are causes Cumming says can be tackled, with help, and the implicit threat of being dropped off The Warehouse’s supplier list.

It is not always a quick process, and it can take up to a year, Cumming says.

Gray says retailers’ own actions can cause excessive hours: both the price they pay, and their demands for short turnarounds on production to keep their shelves stocked.

Retailers have some internal monitoring capability, but a large part of the work is done by third-party auditors.

Briscoe Group, for example, requires its more than 200 supplier factories to provide it with audit reports from approved auditors.

The results indicate where auditors think there may be problems, with Briscoes grading suppliers in terms of “risk” levels: 34% are graded “lowest risk”, 16% “high risk”, with the rest in the middle.

In 2024 it stopped using six factories that did not provide audits.

It would be wrong to see excessive hours as being exclusively a Chinese and Bangladeshi factory problem.

Wesfarmers publishes what it considers to be the highest work abuse risks in its top top 25 supplier locations; 20 are shown as having a high risk of workers doing excessive overtime - and some are high wage economies like Japan and South Korea.

They are Canada, France, US, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Denmark, Israel, India, China and Taiwan, Vietnam, Pakistan, Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Australia, and Indonesia.

Also on that risk list is New Zealand.

Excessive working hours here may not be widespread, and for many they appear linked to owning a business like a farm, but it’s not only business owners and highly paid executives working long hours.

One poster to Reddit in New Zealand described life as a courier driver in Auckland: “You get no leave and have to work 12+ hours a day.”

Data from the last Census found 54.1% of Auckland workers reported working 40 to 49 hours a week, while 9.7% said they worked 50 to 59 hours, and 4.9% said they worked 60 hours or more.

There is also the question about whether New Zealand consumers actually care, or whether most people’s concern over sustainability is just lip service.

The Warehouse sustainability report contains a portion that looks at future pathways on climate change.

Under the “hot house” scenario, which is based on current climate policy here and overseas, it says: “While an increasing number of consumers are concerned about sustainability, purchase patterns and consumer surveys indicate that most remain wed to resource and energy-intensive lifestyles.”

Council of Trade Unions economist Craig Renney says people do care, and retailers know it, which is why so many of them make ethical and sustainability claims.

“I believe most New Zealanders don’t wish to purchase goods and services that are the result of exploitation,” he says.

But low wages in New Zealand compared with the costs of living left many people relying on low-priced imported goods to make ends meet.

“The cost of that poverty here is reflected in the demand for very low-priced goods,” he says.

Some, but not all of it.

The Warehouse, Kmart and Briscoes are all competing with international retailers like Shein and Temu, which are unencumbered by the Red Sheds’ attempts to be ethical.

These have moved beyond fast fashion, creating ultra-fast fashion, where clothing inspired by a design on a fashion runway can be in production in less than two weeks, says Gray.

Even so, Gray is optimistic that things are getting better, though globally, it is estimated 50 million people are living and working in conditions amounting to modern slavery.

“The tide is shifting, but it will take a long time to slow through the complex system we have created,” Gray says.

However, she says: “There is an acceptance that there can’t be this terrible cost.”