"Fired, then Robbed" report highlights fashion brands’ complicity in wage theft during Covid-19
"FIRED, THEN ROBBED Fashion brands’ complicity in wage theft during Covid-19", 07 April 2021
New research by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) reveals that many workers are being denied some or all of this essential compensation, in violation of the law and the labor rights obligations of the brands and retailers whose clothes they sewed.
The WRC has identified 31 export garment factories, in 9 countries , where there is definitive evidence that the factory fired workers and then failed to pay them severance they legally earned. In some cases, workers have received partial payment; in others, they have received nothing. In total, the wage theft at these 31 facilities robbed 37,637 workers of $39.8 million. This is an average of more than a thousand dollars (US) per person, which is about five months’ wages for the typical garment worker.
...The WRC has also identified an additional 210 export apparel factories, in 18 countries, where initial evidence indicates that workers have been deprived of legally mandated severance but where there is, as of yet, insufficient documentation to confirm the violation definitively. Most of these factories supplied well-known fashion brands and retailers... Adding in estimates for workers affected and money owed for these additional cases, we arrive at a total estimate of 213 cases of severance theft among the factories in our data set, costing more than 160,000 workers an estimated $171.5 million.
... Every significant apparel brand and retailer has a self-generated labor rights code of conduct. Virtually without exception, these codes commit the brand to ensure that supplier factories pay all legally mandated wages and benefits. Despite this, brands and retailers chronically fail to ensure that severance is paid, with catastrophic consequences for workers.
...[The] solution must be designed to guarantee that when workers’ entitlement to severance is triggered, the money they are due will be readily available and safely protected from plunder by a greedy or financially desperate employer. Labor unions and advocacy organizations have recently proposed a binding agreement to prevent severance theft that meets these criteria. The proposed agreement would create a global Severance Guarantee Fund (“the Fund”), financed by mandatory payments from signatory brands and retailers.