Holding corporations accountable. Protecting worker rights.

WRC Condemns Murder of Union Organizer

Reinstatement Offers, Compensation, and Safety Improvements at Collegiate Apparel Supplier in Bangladesh

The Lesson of Rana Plaza: Corporate Self-Regulation Is a Formula for Disaster

Apparel brands’ labor rights obligations must be binding and enforceable by worker organizations.

How we work

Enforceable standards

In global manufacturing, regulation usually means self-regulation, with brands inspecting their own suppliers under voluntary standards. The WRC promotes and enforces binding labor standards, the only kind that ever work in the real world.

Worker-Centered investigations

We interview workers away from their factories, without management’s knowledge, so workers can speak openly, with no fear of reprisal. This enables the WRC to uncover labor abuses that brands and their auditing organizations routinely ignore.

Full restitution for rights violations

The WRC compels brands and their suppliers around the world to remedy the abuses we’ve exposed: we’ve achieved tens of millions of dollars in back pay, reinstatement for thousands of unjustly fired workers, and transformative safety improvements.

Systemic change in supply chains

Achieving decent conditions in supply chains requires systemic reform: supplanting voluntary industry promises with enforceable agreements worldwide and obliging brands to end the price pressure on suppliers that impels abuses. We drive strategies to advance this agenda.

El Monte Workers

Thai El Monte Garment Workers Inducted into US Labor Hall of Honor

Twenty-eight years ago last month, consumers opened their newspapers to learn that sweatshops had returned to the US apparel industry, on domestic soil, under conditions unheard of in nearly a century. In August 1995, more than 70 Thai migrant workers were found to be sewing garments sold by major US retailers, under slave labor conditions,…

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Leading Apparel Brands Tolerated Delivery Delays Resulting from Türkiye Earthquake; but Most Have Done Little Else to Support Survivors

New research shows that many apparel giants failed to take appropriate steps to protect suppliers and workers, leaving 48% of factories unable to pay employees in full after quake  A white paper by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) examines how 16 global brands handled their human rights obligations after the devastating earthquake in Türkiye: Pressed…

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Gap Inc. Signs Pakistan Safety Accord in US Breakthrough for Binding Brand-Labor Agreements

Workers in Gap Inc.’s 14 Factories in Pakistan Will Now Benefit from the Accord’s Unparalleled Fire and Building Safety Protections The Worker Rights Consortium applauds Gap Inc. (Athleta, Banana Republic, Gap, Old Navy) for signing the Pakistan Accord on Health & Safety in the Textile & Garment Industry and encourages other US brands to join…

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Hong Seng factory with workers entering and exiting the campus

Nearly Three Years Later, Workers at Nike Supplier Are Still Owed over $800,000

Hong Seng Knitting continues to refuse to provide back pay to more than 99 percent of the affected workers and continues to refuse to pay meaningful compensation to the Burmese migrant worker who was forced to flee the country after management reported him to the police…

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