Italian fashion house Alviero Martini, intervened for labor exploitation

The House of fashion Italian Alviero Martini, who deals in footwear and accessories, was judicially intervened by the Court of Milan after a labor inspection found that profits would have been maximized by using “clandestine factories with Chinese citizens.”

According to the investigations that led to the intervention, the company “I would never have carried out inspections in the production chain to verify the real working conditions” and “the technical capabilities of the contracted companies.”

It was found, the media explains, that the fashion house had trusted “all production to third-party companies, with total subcontracting of production processes” and that these were supported by “clandestine factories with Chinese workers, who in turn manage to reduce costs thanks to the use of irregular and clandestine labor in exploitative conditions.”

The Carabineros carried out investigations “on the methods of production, packaging and marketing of haute couture garments, proceeding to the control of the subjects in charge of the contracts, as well as the unauthorized subcontractors that consist exclusively of factories managed by Chinese citizens in the provinces of Milan, Monza, Brianza and Pavia.”

In particular, eight factories were controlled “all of them irregular, in which 197 were identified workersof which 37 were illegally employed”.

According to the media, the investigations collect testimonies from Chinese workers who claim that “They pay 1.25 euros for each upper part of a shoe and during the week they sleep above the company, on the first floor, in rooms used as bedrooms.”

“In a working day I produce about 20 pairs of shoes (…) I receive a monthly bank transfer of about 600 euros that is paid to us by the owner who produces shoes for the Alviero Martini company,” reads one of the testimonies collected by the Italian media.

According to the prosecutor’s office, the workers, according to the documents, received salaries below the poverty line, that is, just over 6 euros per hour, and lived in places with “micro rooms, completely illegal and with “improvised electrical equipment.

The investigations proved that for a product sold on the market for 350 euros, the Chinese factory would have charged 20 euros and following the chain of production subcontracts, the haute couture company, according to the researchers, paid 50 euros for the final product.