BANGLADESH — Representatives overseeing child employees of the most successful garment factory in the country reported the illegal laborers can’t keep up with the production of Metallica branded clothing.
“It’s just too much,” said 8-year-old Aijaz Biswas, one of the more senior members of the Child Laborer Division at H&M’s garment factory. “We have to cut and sew this stuff so fast that my hands feel like they are on fire. My shredded, bloody fingers aren’t the worst part of this job, they will heal. It’s the terrible art printed on all the shirts? It will stay with me for life. Talk about salt to the wound. My manager says if we can produce 75% more product this year then the band will send us a video message thanking us. But I don’t know who these guys are, and I wish they would stop touring so we can slow down a little.”
Members of Metallica don’t see a problem with utilizing child laborers to produce clothes emblazoned with their branding.
“I mean, come on,” said Kirk Hammett, lead singer and guitarist. “We’re giving these kids an opportunity. How sick is it that they get to work for the most kickass metal band ever to grace the earth? It’s great for their resumes, and think about it, by the time they reach a more appropriate age to work jobs on the business side of the music industry, they’ll already have decades of experience working for mother fucking Metallica, baby! Besides all that, there’s no way we can survive rocking all these stadiums without the financial catalyst of these crappy t-shirts sold at fast-fashion outlets to teenage girls. We would starve otherwise.”
According to high-level executives at various cheap fashion stores, the “Metallica Effect” is mutually beneficial in that it makes everyone but the child laborers boatloads of money.
“If Metallica didn’t exist, our company would have gone down the drain a long time ago,” said Daniel Ervér, President of multinational fast fashion clothing store H&M. “We aren’t the only ones who rely on Metallica to survive. Forever 21, Zara, Shein, I could go on and on. The relationship between fast fashion companies and Metallica is so symbiotic now, we need them to continuously crank out these sub-par albums, just as much as they need us to keep producing sub-par articles of clothing for them to sell at 100 times the cost of production in every mall in the West.”
At press time, Lars Ulrich was too busy drafting a lawsuit against someone who made NFTs slightly referencing their shirts to comment.