Amazon found selling clothes from factories other retailers blacklist

After a 2013 factory collapse killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh, most of the biggest U.S. apparel retailers joined safety-monitoring groups that required them to stop selling clothing from factories that violated certain safety standards.

Amazon.com Inc. didn’t join.

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, the site today offers a steady stream of clothing from dozens of Bangladeshi factories that most leading retailers have said are too dangerous to allow into their supply chains.

A yellow gingham toddler top embroidered with flowers was among those clothes, listed on Amazon for $4.99 by a New York City retailer. The Journal traced the top to a factory in Chittagong, Bangladesh, that has no fire alarms and where doors are of a type managers can lock and keep workers in. A laborer at the factory, 18-year-old Nasreen Begum, said she spends 12-hour days there stitching shirts with 300 others. “You’re trapped inside until the time you complete the orders,” she said.

The Journal found other apparel on Amazon made in Bangladeshi factories whose owners have refused to fix safety problems identified by two safety-monitoring groups, such as crumbling buildings, broken alarms, and missing sprinklers and fire barriers. U.S. retailers such as Walmart Inc., Target Corp. , Costco Wholesale Corp. and Gap Inc. have agreed to honor bans imposed by those two groups, to have their supply chains inspected and to disclose to the groups the factories that supply them.

The Journal found clothing including pants, sweaters, clerical robes, fishnet body stockings and other items, that originate from blacklisted factories and end up on Amazon.

Amazon has become a major player in apparel, a force with which other retailers must compete in a market where customers often seek the lowest price. It may have overtaken Walmart last year as America’s No. 1 clothing seller. Amazon dominates the rapidly growing online-retail market.

Here, as throughout Amazon’s business, the giant retailer runs its platform without many of the constraints that big U.S. companies apply to their products and stores, sometimes in ways that can put customers and workers in danger.

That is particularly true for Amazon’s third-party marketplace, made up of millions of individual sellers. Many are anonymous and aren’t subject to some of the oversight Amazon applies to its own brands and to items it sells directly.

The Journal in August revealed that thousands of products listed on Amazon are deemed unsafe by federal agencies, are deceptively labeled or are banned by regulators—items that many retailers’ policies bar. They included items such as unsafe children’s toys and recalled motorcycle helmets. Amazon took down some of those listings after the Journal’s reporting. Several members of Congress called on Amazon to better police its site.

An Amazon spokeswoman said at the time that “safety is a top priority” and that the company uses automated tools to weed out suspicious sellers.

Asked about its practices in clothing, the company removed some listings the Journal identified from banned Bangladeshi factories, including the yellow top, and said it was reviewing the others. A spokesman said Amazon inspects factories that supply its own brands to ensure they are in line with international safety standards similar to those of the safety-monitoring groups. The Journal didn’t find Amazon-owned brands made in banned factories.

Of the banned factories the Journal found with apparel on Amazon, some of the clothing items they produced were for sale by Amazon directly. Most—more than two-thirds—were being sold by third-party sellers using Amazon’s marketplace platform.

The spokesman said Amazon doesn’t inspect factories making clothing that it buys from wholesalers or that comes from third-party sellers. Instead, it expects those wholesalers and sellers to adhere to the same safety standards.

Amazon’s agreement with third-party sellers doesn’t explicitly say they must meet those standards.

Amazon’s agreement with third-party sellers doesn’t explicitly say they must meet those standards.

The company’s control of its site is under scrutiny by some Congress members who are calling for more regulation of the company. Other U.S. technology giants that have lost control of their platforms—or decline to control them—face similar pressures. Amazon consumer chief Jeff Wilke, at the WSJ Tech Live conference Tuesday, said Amazon might need to spend billions of dollars to police products on its site to preserve customer trust.

Ethical lines aren’t clear-cut in the global garment-supply chain, which remains a murky network in which clothes pass from factories through traders around the world. Even signatories to one of the safety groups have offered items that come from unsafe factories.

Some garments the Journal found on Amazon were also listed on Walmart.com, mostly by third parties on the online marketplace Walmart developed after Amazon’s third-party market grew rapidly. The Journal found garments from one banned factory listed online by Target.

Walmart spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said the company was looking into the items for sale directly by Walmart and talking to the companies that supplied them. Target removed its listing after the Journal pointed it out, and declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Sears and Kmart, whose previous parent company was a member of a safety-monitoring group, have resumed importing from banned factories, shipping records show. A new postbankruptcy ownership structure under financier Edward Lampert didn’t continue as a member of monitoring groups. A spokesman for Sears and Kmart didn’t respond to questions about the company’s sourcing policies.