ALL WORK, NO PLAY

Child labor at SHEIN exploits children just to take away their basic rights

by Izzy Munn

photos by Jordan Brady

At 7 years old I was in the first grade doing puzzles, drawing pictures and going to school.

This isn’t the case for the child workers in SHEIN factories.

Children are being forced to work up to 12 hours a day for little to no money at all. With our help, we can stop shopping on fast fashion sites and save thousands of lives. According to CNN, SHEIN is an online shopping site that gained popularity in 2019. When COVID started, more teens started shopping online and discovered the fashion phenomenon, SHEIN. The website was a hit and gained so much popularity that a trend called the “SHEIN Haul” was started.

Soon after becoming popular, child labor claims against SHEIN came out. Ever since, SHEIN has been denying these claims but won’t release the information that could prove their innocence. When asked about the claims, a SHEIN delegate said the report would be released in “a couple weeks.” Since then, nothing has been announced to the public.

With the aid of teens around the world we can help kids whose rights are being taken away. If we stop shopping from places like SHEIN that have claims of child labor, then we could demolish child labor just by getting jeans from a different site. According to World Counts, at least 22,000 kids die in the workforce each year. As customers of the fashion industry we hold all of the power. If we boycott shopping at SHEIN, then they’ll run out of money and will be forced to change. And if we don’t, then that 22,000 will continue to rise and then, are we any better than the stores that use child labor in the first place?

IS THE MASK A BIG ASK?

Student objection to the protection injection: a reflection

by Ryan Clulow

Although mistrust has always been harbored by American voters, its role in American society has morphed under the unique conditions of today. Mistrust is now an essential tool of voters. In conjunction with the modern day abundance of misinformation, the consequences have not only proven detrimental to democracy, but potentially harmful for the American welfare.

Columbus North itself has seen the face of this rampant mistrust, as the high school students, this resistance can easily be translated onto a national level. This group could be drawn to represent the crisis on a much larger scale, millions of Americans with similar ideas and intentions. All of them united by a shared disdain for wearing masks standing on a foundation of misinformation.

Objectively, wearing a mask curbs the spread of the virus and vaccines effectively avoid a significant amount of potential transmissions. This information is not only legitimate but it is easily accessible to almost all Americans. Despite how glaringly crucial to American welfare this information is, it is continually neglected and disregarded by the aforementioned resistant populous. It is easy to dismiss this crisis, to say that willful ignorance is ingrained in the fabric of our nation. This frame of thought is ignorant in itself, a continuation of the needless “Us vs Them,” politics that occupies the space between partisan institutions. Widespread ignorance on this scale is anything but willful. We as a nation must recognize it as a true testament to the decrepit state of American democracy. design by Ananya Adur photos by Jordan Brady

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