France’s parliament on Thursday backed a string of measures making low-cost fast fashion, especially from Chinese mass producers, less attractive to buyers.
Protectionism makes us all poorer in the long run.
Free markets make free people.
Free people as in free from exploitation, free from polluted environments, free from unsafe work conditions? Then I’m with you.
European countries may not be perfect, but they do seem to have working governments that produce legislation not 110% beholden to economic interest of corporations
There’s a lot of protectionism though.
Like this will drive higher inflation.
Inflation does not seem worse over there than in “free for all”© capitalism in the USA
PS: to be fair, USA is very protectionist as well, it’s just they only protect the 1%
A tax like this will make the prices of some goods go up. Such price increases are measured as inflation.
This is a highly regressive tax. It’s 50% on certain items below 5 EUR (soon 10) and less for items above that. Over the price, the rate goes down. For items at 50 EUR (100 EUR), it is only 10%.
Making cheap clothing in particular more expensive doesn’t sound much like looking out for the 99%.
Good idea. I wonder if the implementation works correctly though:
A surcharge linked to fast fashion’s ecological footprint of five euros ($5.45) per item is planned from next year, rising to 10 euros by 2030. The charge cannot, however, exceed 50 percent of an item’s price tag.
So the 1€ shirt from Shein is going to cost 1.5€? That’s not going to have much effect when sustainable shirts start around 15€.
I also guess Chinese marketplaces may still evade the law by hiding behind exaggerated shipping costs or maybe even splitting up into multiple entities with a lower release cadence. Afaics, people already buy clothing from sketchy, Tiktok-advertised Shopify sites.
I still don’t understand how this would work - everything is staying the same production wise, workers are payed poorly, unsafe conditions, but the product will cost more? And then customers will pay more for their clothings and that will be used to push other, more sustainable manufacturers?
That is my understanding as well, yes.
I think there’s some rhyme and reason to it: France has limited insight into random manufacturing operations somewhere in Asia, so it can’t directly regulate there. That’s especially true if the clothing is sold by a Chinese platform as well which I don’t expect to care much about the EU supply chain regulation either.
