Hollow Wealth: How Cheap Clothes Bankrupt Real Prosperity

How fast fashion’s record profits rest on half-price livelihoods.

By Kanishka S. for Atlas October

At Dawn, the Factory Gates Yawn

We begin in Tan Thuan Export Processing Zone, Ho Chi Minh City, where a grey predawn mist hangs over three vast sewing halls. Half-lit trucks disgorge bolt after bolt of fabric while columns of workers in company-issue polo shirts stream toward the turnstiles. Among them is Linh, a twenty-four-year-old line-leader who, like most of her crew, left the rice paddies of Đồng Tháp for a wage that promised—on paper—to beat the fields. She pockets about VND 4.9 million a month (roughly US $187). The Global Living Wage Coalition pegs the cost of a “basic but decent life” in Ho Chi Minh City at VND 9 million to VND 13 million[¹]. The math is blunt: the pay packet covers a little better than half of what it takes to live without skipping meals or rent.

“Our goal is to guarantee not only a minimum wage but a living wage across our supply chain.” —Fast Retailing Integrated Report 2024[²]

Linh has read none of the glossy reports that make that promise, yet her ledger knows the gap by heart.

The Productivity Paradox Unpicked

Vietnam’s garment exports have tripled in value since 2010. Output per worker is up more than 50 per cent, according to Better Work Vietnam audits[³]. Wages, adjusted for inflation, have crawled. The same pattern repeats across Asia and Latin America—proof that globalization’s promise of the rising tide that raises all boats, instead just soaks some boots while polishing a small fleet of yachts for the elites.

• Vietnam: Output ↑ ~50 %, real wages ↑ ~7 % (2010-24).
  

• Bangladesh: Output ↑ ~60 %, real wages ↑ ~4 %.
  

• Mexico (maquiladora⁴ sector): Output ↑ ~35 %, real wages ↓ 2 %.[⁵]

If productivity were a fair referee, pay would track performance. Instead, the scoreboard lies.

‘Bridging Gaps’—in Theory

Gap Inc. tells investors it is “working with suppliers so that appropriate wages are provided … enough to meet basic needs and some discretionary income.”[⁶] Levi Strauss vows to “do business only with suppliers that provide wages matching prevailing local industry practices.”[⁷] Both statements are technically true—and strategically hollow. Prevailing practice is precisely the problem.

Across forty Vietnamese factories that supply Gap and Levi’s, average line-operator pay last year was VND 5.2 million—well above the legal minimum, yet barely 40% of a living wage benchmarked by Asia Floor Wage Alliance.[⁸] When asked why wages fail to keep pace, one factory-level HR manager offers a shrug Linh has heard before: “Unit price is set by the brand.”

Two Brands, Two Continents, One Playbook

The label on the box may travel farther than the numbers on the payslip.

1. Vietnam to Mexico shuffle

   • Gap has sourced basics from Ho Chi Minh City since the late 1990s; in 2023 it reopened purchase orders in Puebla to hedge against freight shocks.

   • Levi’s runs denim lines in Đồng Nai and specialized sewing operations in the state of Coahuila.
     

2. The peso reality check

   • The average monthly wage for textile workers in Puebla sits at MXN 3,180 (about US $167).[⁹]

   • A living wage for Michoacán (a region with comparable cost of living) is MXN 14,505.[¹⁰]

   • Brands tout cheaper shipping to U.S. storefronts; workers absorb the discount.
     

3. Pricing power

   • Factory managers in both countries report per-piece prices negotiated down to the last cent; lost revenue gets clawed back through ever tighter quotas.
     

Enter Uniqlo: Quality Basics, Familiar Margins

Fast Retailing’s Uniqlo sells “LifeWear” at prices pitched as responsible alternatives to fast fashion. Yet the company itself concedes “gaps between worker wages and a living wage remain in our partner factories; we are seeking solutions.”[²] A target record operating profit of JPY 530 billion (about US $3.6 billion) for Fast Retailing’s fiscal year ending in August suggests the solution has not reached Linh.

Ultra-Fast Fashion Hits the Gas

Just as Gap, Levi’s and Uniqlo polish their CSR prose, Shein and its ultra-fast peers shatter the speed limit entirely. A 2025 BBC investigation found Shein supplier staff clocking 75-hour work weeks for piece-rate pay that slid under China’s legal minimum.[¹¹] If traditional fast fashion drains wages slowly, ultra-fast fashion yanks the plug.

What Keeps the Lie Alive

• Distance delusion — supply chains scatter hardship across time zones.
  

• Merit myth — we are told hard work is the ticket out, yet the rungs have been cut away above us.
  

• Value inversion — prosperity is tallied in margin points, not in human potential.
  

Why Hollow Wealth Hurts Everyone

Some of you may live continents away from Linh, but her shrinking pay anchors our own prospects. When wealth pools at the top, spending power thins in the middle; demand stalls, political fractures widen, and the social contract frays. A system that underwrites $19.99 jeans with half-price livelihoods is not efficient—it is parasitic, feeding on the future it claims to create.

The Distance-Proof Poverty of Profit

We built the current rules, so we can rewrite them. Until wages rise to meet the cost of living—in Vietnam, Mexico, or anywhere else in the world a garment worker threads a needle—every record profit is a line item of hollow wealth. The next time we celebrate a bargain, we might ask who quietly paid the balance.

Endnotes

1. Global Living Wage Coalition, Living Wage for Minimum Wage Region 1, Vietnam, update 2024.

2. Fast Retailing, Integrated Report 2024, p. 38.

3. Better Work Vietnam, Annual Synthesis Report 2024.

4. A maquiladora is a foreign-owned factory in Mexico that assembles, processes, or manufactures goods, primarily for export, with preferential tariff treatment. These factories benefit from duty-free or reduced-duty import of raw materials and components, and often export the finished products back to the parent country or to other markets. The term is often associated with the US-Mexico border region, where these types of manufacturing operations are prevalent.

5. ILOSTAT; INEGI manufacturing survey (Mexico), 2010-24 real wage series.

6. Gap Inc., Wages and Benefits policy page, updated 2025.

7. Levi Strauss & Co., Supply Chain: Going Beyond Compliance, 2024 Sustainability Report.

8. Asia Floor Wage Alliance, Living Wage Calculations 2024 dataset.

9. Mexico Secretaría de Economía, DataMéxico portal, Textile Workers Average Salary, Q3 2024.

10. Anker Research Institute, Living Wage Benchmark, Michoacán, update 2024.

11. BBC / Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, “Shein suppliers’ workers face 75-hour work weeks,” Jan. 9 2025.