"‘To survive, I must appear fearless’: the former nun helping India’s garment workers fight sexual violence", 25 May 2022

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[Thivya] Rakini... smashed cultural taboos and became a social pariah for choosing to leave her marriage and bring up her son as a single mother in a remote part of a deeply traditional and caste-bound state.

Now, in her role as president of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU), Tamil Nadu’s only female-led garment workers union, she has turned her attention to the multibillion-pound global fashion industry...

Since 2015, Rakini and the TTCU have been fighting what she describes as a “plague” of rape, harassment and sexual violence that has infested global garment supply chains and is being perpetrated on poor women making clothing destined for high streets across the UK...

In her seven years at the TTCU, Rakini has seen enough to pour scorn on the insistence of many global fashion brands that they do everything in their power to protect the millions of poor black and brown women working in garment supply chains....“International brands who buy from Tamil Nadu know very well that women in their supply chains are exploited to the core, they know the impact that their production targets and their poverty wages have on the workers’ lives. Their auditors know their inspections are meaningless. Their whole system is a lie.”...

...[I]n February 2021, Rakini got a phone call from the family of a young garment worker called Jeyasre Kathiravel, who had failed to come home from her shift at Natchi Apparels, a local clothes factory supplying brands including H&M. Rakini says that she had already approached Natchi Apparels in 2019 after women complained about being sexually harassed, but had been told not to get involved in factory business.

After Kathiravel’s disappearance, Rakini and the TTCU say they once again tried to approach Natchi Apparels, this time about Kathiravel’s disappearance but were rebuffed. Four days later, her body was found in farmland close to her village.

Her supervisor at Natchi Apparels was arrested shortly afterwards and her grieving family claimed that he had been inflicting relentless sexual harassment and abuse on their daughter in the months leading up to her death, but that she had felt unable to stop what was happening. He has since confessed to her murder and is in jail awaiting trial...

Rakini and the TTCU leaders spent weeks travelling between garment worker villages, taking testimonies from dozens of other women who said that they had been raped, coerced and intimidated into sexual relationships with their managers at Natchi Apparels.

At the time, the management at Natchi Apparels denied that there was any violence against female workers at its factory. It has since said that while it still disputes some of the claims, it has taken all the allegations seriously and as a result has “created systems, processes, and procedures to protect and promote the rights of female workers”...

As a result of those testimonies and an independent investigation into sexual violence at the factory, its client H&M agreed to enter into negotiations with the TTCU and international labour groups. The TTCU helped negotiate a series of agreements at Natchi Apparels with both H&M and Eastman Exports, the company that owns Natchi. Last month, a year after Kathiravel’s death, a series of legally binding agreements that aim to eliminate all gender-based violence and harassment from the factory floor were signed.

“This is the first agreement of its kind in India and has the power to save women’s lives,” says Rakini. TTCU members will sit on the internal complaints committee and act as monitors on the factory floor, to supervise the supervisors and to help ensure a zero-tolerance approach to violence in the workplace.

Since the news of the agreement that has been reached at Natchi, the TTCU has been inundated with requests from women at other factories begging it to come to their aid. “This is just the start,” she says...

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