"Laid-off during the pandemic: A case-study of the closure of a garment factory", 22 December 2020

The case study documents the events around the closure of the Euro Clothing Company– 2 (ECC-2) … The factory … had been only producing for … H&M. The factory declared a sudden lay-off on June 6, sparking off one of the longest protests from garment factory workers in recent memory. The lay-off was illegal because the management had not sought permission from the state government.. When the lay-off was announced in the evening after working hours, all 1300-odd workers from the factory stayed back to protest at the factory premises. Over the course of the next few weeks, over 50 percent of the workers were pressurised into resigning because of various strategies of force adopted by the management … [N]early 600 workers stood their ground, demanding that the factory be reopened. These protests were led by the Garment and Textile Workers Union (GATWU), which had been unionising workers in the factory since 2014 ... That workers at the exploited end of the global supply chain held out against the management during a world-wide pandemic makes these protests even more noteworthy.