In the midst of a nationwide campaign to restructure their board and a contentious fight at the bargaining table, the members of the REI Union were dismayed to learn that REI’s culture of union busting and worker exploitation extended deep into their supply chain. Released in December 2024, a comprehensive report compiled instances of reported human rights and labor abuses at multiple Southeast Asian and Central American factories that REI contracted with. Workers at REI’s US retailers, represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, are resolved to make lasting change at the popular co-op, both at the bargaining table and within the board room, and the report’s release underscores the importance of that fight. 

‘Beneath REI’s Green Sheen’: Bombshell report exposes human rights abuses in REI’s supply chain

In early December, a report on REI’s relationships with their suppliers rocked the outdoor world. Students for International Labor Solidarity (SILS) teamed up with researchers at UMass-Amherst’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Labor Center to dig into REI’s relationships with factories along their supply chain. The resulting report, ‘Beneath REI’s Green Sheen,’ pulled the bulk of its information from publicly available documents, international reporting, and worker interviews to form a clearer picture of the conditions that international workers labor under in the factories that REI has contracted with. The report found that REI’s use of co-op language “serves to bolster its brand image as a socially and ecologically-minded democratic organization, and helps to mask its corporate ownership structure,” and that “REI’s partnerships for “responsible sourcing and fair labor” offer minimal public transparency and lack enforceable obligations on REI to address identified violations.”

In El Salvador in 2017, union workers were fired en masse after a legal increase in the country’s minimum wage was implemented at Textiles Opico, a garment manufacturer that REI has contracted with for over a decade. According to the report, SITRASACOSI, the Salvadoran garment union, alleged that “union members were targeted in part to punish them for pressing management to fulfill its labor rights obligations,” which was independently investigated and found to have merit by the Salvadoran Ministry of Labor. In the wake of those findings, Textiles Opico reportedly refused to reinstate the fired workers until international pressure pushed the factory to remedy the situation. According to independent labor monitor Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), REI did nothing to contribute to the international pressure campaign, and as of December 2024, continues to buy from the factory.

In Taiwan, migrant workers at Giant Manufacturing, which supplied bicycles to REI from 2021 to 2024, were ensnared in expensive recruitment schemes, where they were required to pay exorbitant fees to recruiters in order to secure employment. As a result, many workers were forced to take out high interest loans, leaving them in severe debt. In order to pay those debts, and in some cases pay monthly fees to labor brokers, workers were obliged to work extreme overtime hours and housed in overcrowded, unsanitary dormitories on factory grounds. As the report suggests, “these abuses amount to at least five indicators of forced labor: abuse of vulnerability, intimidation and threats, debt bondage, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime.” The report also finds that although REI no longer contracts with Giant Manufacturing, the brand maintained a relationship with the factory at the same time that workers were testifying about their appalling work and living conditions.

The report also elaborates on a number of other cases, including: workers who were disciplined by being forced to sit outdoors on searing concrete in triple digit heat; using short-term contract schemes to deny workers legally protected bargaining rights; discrimination and intimidation against migrant workers; weaponizing the courts against union organizers; and discriminatory firings of union workers at various REI suppliers across primarily Southeast Asia and Central America.

REI’s messaging states that it adheres to a comprehensive internal code of conduct relating to its partnerships with factories farther down the supply chain. The tenets laid forth in its Factory Code of Conduct include such items as “Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining,” where employers respect the legal rights of employees to form unions and collectively bargain; “Voluntary Employment,” where employers will not use forced labor in any form in their factories; and harassment policies which state that employers that they work with “will not use physical or psychological disciplinary tactics” upon their workforce. Researchers found that REI contracted with factories in multiple countries over a period of over 10 years where conditions did not meet those standards. 

Additionally, researchers found that REI “does not prioritize long-term relationships with its suppliers,” preferring instead to switch out suppliers dozens of times over less than a decade, “potentially impacting as many as 100,000 workers.” As the report suggests, frequent supplier hopping “is the opposite of a sustainable approach to supply chain management.”

“It is extraordinary that our limited research identified so many violations at REI supplier factories, especially when workers are generally terrified to report publicly on rights violations they experience for fear of being retaliated against by their employer,” the report said. “It is therefore reasonable to assume that the violations described in this report are only a very small portion of the actual extent of labor abuses in REI’s global supply chain.”

In the report’s conclusion, researchers underscored the gravity of the situation regarding REI’s relationship with their suppliers. “Ultimately, we found a yawning gap between REI’s pretensions to social responsibility and the evidence provided by the workers who make its outdoor gear,” the report said. “Unless REI takes immediate and meaningful action to address these failings, its claims of social responsibility will continue to ring hollow.”

Katie Nguyen, national organizer for SILS and co-author of the report, explained the importance of the research, saying, “We knew that there was this ongoing union fight with REI, and so we wanted to connect our two struggles of ‘what are workers facing in REI’s global supply chain and how can we act in solidarity with US retail workers who are also organizing on [sic] REI?’” SILS’s primary focus is mobilizing students to organize in solidarity with garment workers in the global garment industry. 

Nguyen drew attention to REI’s messaging around environmental sustainability and conscious consumer culture as a key factor in shining more of a spotlight on the brand’s production. “Any time a brand promotes itself as sustainable and really progressive, that raises flags about whether that’s really a reality, especially as you go deeper into the supply chain and it gets farther away from a US or Western consumer base.” 

Upon learning of the abuses suffered by workers in REI’s supply chain, US workers were shocked. “I’m extremely concerned and dismayed and horrified that I work for a company that has this sort of public face where we want everyone to get access to the natural world or outdoor life, when there are people that they effectively employ who are living in squalor and intimidation of losing their livelihood at all times–this sort of fly-by-night factory usage, where they bounce from facility to facility to get the lower rates for production of fast fashion garments,” said Andy Trebing, worker at one of REI’s Chicago locations.

Upending the Board, with a Vote

As the board campaign swings into its final weeks, workers have split their focus with ongoing contract negotiations across their 11 unionized shops. REI refused to negotiate at a national table, so workers are forced to bargain shop by shop. According to Megan Shan, bargaining committee member for the Durham, North Carolina, shop, proposals are similar across the board and bargaining has been coordinated via national calls in order to present a united front to the company. “For all of our union stores, and probably the non-union stores too, we have a lot of the same issues regarding scheduling, hours, safety,” she said. “It’s all pretty universal.” Workers hope that REI’s new CEO, Mary Beth Laughton, will be more willing to work with them in securing a contract.

For some union workers, who have struggled for years to win a first contract, the board campaign embodies an earnest effort to engage in international solidarity with fellow workers who are experiencing the same exploitation farther down the supply chain. “We all as workers came to REI because we believe in the values that they claim publicly, and we do want to hold them accountable,” Shan said, “So I think it’s up to us to raise our voices in this fight.”

REI is a consumer co-op, meaning that any consumer can pay a one-time membership fee to join. Members are then able to elect a governing board, who are responsible for decision-making for the brand. According to REI’s own board website, “REI’s board is legally responsible for the overall direction of the affairs and the performance of REI. The board carries out this legal responsibility by establishing broad policy and ensuring REI management is operating within the framework of these policy guidelines.” 

Years of union busting at their US locations and the increasingly corporate structure of the board led union workers from REI stores across the United States to seek out candidates who might bring a better voice to the board’s current corporate makeup. As Davie Jamieson reported for HuffPost in January 2025, “Allegations that REI is no longer a co-op in spirit predate the union campaign by at least a couple of decades. A 2003 Seattle Weekly story portrayed a profit-driven and opaque corporation that wouldn’t divulge its then-chief executive’s compensation. “Who Owns REI?” the story asked. “It can’t be the members.” (REI now makes executive pay public. [Former CEO Eric] Artz made $2.7 million in 2023 and topped $4 million in previous years.)”

According to REI’s bylaws, any member in good standing can submit an application to be nominated for their governing board. Co-op members will then vote for the nominee that they believe will govern the co-op effectively. The position requires significant business and management experience, but according to the board website, “all self-nominated candidates are considered during the selection process.” Ahead of this year’s board election, union members approached Tefere Gebre and Shemona Moreno to submit an application for the ballot. Both candidates work in the environmental justice movement, with experience running large climate-focused nonprofits. Gebre is the former executive vice president of the AFL-CIO and current chief program officer at Greenpeace.

Moreno is the executive director of 350 Seattle, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to the struggle for climate justice. Their organizing has focused on what Moreno calls “‘No’ Fights” and “‘Yes’ Fights,” where organizers have waged campaigns against increased fossil fuel infrastructure (pipelines, for instance), as well as worked within communities to create more green initiatives, as well as advocating for the Green New Deal. When the union approached Moreno with an idea to run for REI’s board, she was enthusiastic. “They’re like, ‘Shemona, we have an idea, this great idea. Would you be interested? We think you’d be great,’ and my response was like, ‘Hell yeah, I’d love to! I didn’t know that was an option, but I’m totally down to do it!’”

After they verified her membership as still valid, Moreno put together the application to the board and submitted the materials before the deadline. For weeks, Moreno didn’t hear anything back from the board. It wasn’t until she began doing press interviews about her candidacy that she was notified that she never submitted an application, despite having screenshots of the application being submitted before the deadline. “I was kind of shocked by that,” she said. “I thought for sure they would just kind of respond like ‘well, you don’t meet our qualifications; you don’t have enough business experience,’— I thought that would be the way they would go, but to straight out lie was pretty shocking for me.”

Ultimately, the candidates that REI submitted to their membership did not include any of the proposed nominees that were backed by the union. In response, the union waged a national campaign to urge members to vote “Withhold” on the proposed slate in hopes of sending a message that the current makeup of the board is too corporate and has strayed too far from the values that the co-op purports to embody (To give a sense of just how corporate the board has become, one need only look at the resumes of their current members: Chairman of United Airlines, former exec at Nike, former Exxon-Mobile marketing director, to name a few). The publication of UMass Amherst’s report added extra urgency to the campaign.

REI’s official social media channels are inundated with comments from members who are outraged at the board’s treatment of US retail workers and workers abroad, as well as their endorsement (and subsequent retraction of said endorsement) of Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who has stated publicly that he would like to strip the national parks of their resources in order to increase energy production in the US, and oversaw the firing of thousands of National Park Service employees. 

For Trebing, international solidarity with workers is an indelible part of the package. “I feel like the moment you know that someone else is being exploited and you don’t do something about it, or try to do something about it, you’re complicit,” he said. “I think if we are to honor the work and sacrifice that organizers have done before us in trying to protect the working class here and across the globe—if we don’t honor that, then why are we doing any of this?” 

The voting period for the board will conclude on May 1.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.