In Closing Its Remaining Unionized Garment Factories in Honduras, Fruit of the Loom Is Hurting Workers and Killing a Symbol of Labor Rights Progress
Fruit of the Loom, which made groundbreaking commitments in 2009 to ensure that its employees in Honduras could exercise their legal right to form unions freely and without retaliation, is now in the final stages of closing its two remaining unionized garment factories in the country. These closures are tragic for the thousands of workers affected: for nearly 15 years, they enjoyed respect for their right to freedom of association and better wages and conditions achieved through collective bargaining. And, while it is common for factories to close in the garment industry, it is deeply discouraging to see a facility shuttered that has been a widely recognized symbol of genuine respect for workers’ associational rights—in a region and an industry where these rights have often been trampled.
In January 2025, Fruit of the Loom announced its plan to close the two factories: Jerzees Nuevo Día in Choloma and Confecciones Dos Caminos in Cortés. In April, it shut down Jerzees Nuevo Día. Confecciones Dos Caminos is still operating with a skeleton crew of workers but will be fully closed by the end of June.
The Jerzees Nuevo Día (“New Day”) factory commenced operations in January 2010 as part of the resolution of labor rights violations committed by Fruit of the Loom and its subsidiary Russell Athletic and documented in a 2008 WRC investigation. The violations included the company’s unlawful closure of a factory known as Jerzees de Honduras in retaliation for the efforts of a new union at the factory to bargain collectively. The illegal closure was met with a robust international response. Because Fruit of the Loom made university logo products, and because universities impose binding labor rights obligations on their licensees, student activists and universities played a central role in efforts to hold Fruit of the Loom accountable, with more than 100 schools taking action to strip the company of its licensing rights.
Advocates identified the reopening of the facility as the only adequate remedy for the violations and, faced with this enormous pressure, the company ultimately acceded. The business reopened with a new name, Jerzees Nuevo Día, chosen to embody Fruit of the Loom’s new commitment to respect the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively.
Not only did the company offer the fired workers employment at the new factory and fully compensate them for the wages they had lost in the interim, it also made new enforceable commitments to respect workers’ rights across all its factories in Honduras. Workers began establishing unions at the factories and negotiating for improved working conditions. Workers successfully organized six of Fruit of the Loom’s seven Honduran assembly facilities, including five garment factories and a textile mill.
The precedent set by Fruit of the Loom led to increased respect for workers’ rights across the country’s entire garment industry. Over the decade following the reopening of Jerzees Nuevo Día, many other factory owners agreed to respect associational rights and workers organized many facilities. The Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Pennsylvania State University documented this extraordinary progress in a 2022 report, showing that this has led to life-changing gains in wages and benefits. As noted in the report, workers were able to negotiate food and transportation benefits, wages sufficient to allow for modest personal savings, and protections from harassment and abuse, including gender-based violence.
Against this backdrop of labor rights advances, Fruit of the Loom, in 2016, began closing one unionized garment factory after another. Now, with these most recent closures, there will be none left.[1] Fruit of the Loom’s decision to close Jerzees Nuevo Día and Confecciones Dos Caminos is a particularly brutal blow. One worker shared the following with the WRC:
I was so happy when we convinced Fruit of the Loom to open the Jerzees Nuevo Día factory. I was able to go back to work, and this allowed me to earn a stable wage and afford my children’s education and support my parents. We were able to exercise our right to freedom of association and negotiate good benefits in our contract.
Now I feel terrible, both emotionally and economically. I have lost my job again, and I feel that Fruit of the Loom betrayed me. The company failed to uphold the promise it made when it told us it would provide stable employment and respect for freedom of association.
Fruit of the Loom has, of course, offered business justifications for its decision to close these two factories, and the WRC has not formally examined the question of whether the presence of unions was a factor in the company’s decision-making. What is clear is that the closures will be devastating for the affected workers and that Fruit of the Loom, which received numerous accolades for making and implementing the 2009 agreement, can no longer be seen as a leader in advancing respect for fundamental workplace rights.
The progress achieved across the industry in Honduras on respect for the right to organize and bargain, which was catalyzed by the workers’ successful battle with Fruit of the Loom in 2009, has made a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people—garment workers and their families. In important ways, this sector-wide progress will be sustained: tens of thousands of Honduran workers continue to sew clothes in unionized factories with strong collective bargaining agreements. But Fruit of the Loom will no longer be part of that progress, and the fact that a company that was once Honduras’s largest private employer has closed almost all of its garment factories—and every unionized one—undermines confidence in the viability of high-road manufacturing in the apparel sector.
Jerzees “New Day” stood as a symbol of hope for something better for the world’s garment workers. Fruit of the Loom could have prioritized keeping it open, whether or not there was a marginal economic advantage to be gained from its closure. Genuine leadership on labor rights sometimes requires taking a longer view than the next quarterly report.
[1] One of the five unionized garment factories, VFI, was converted in 2014 from a garment factory to a distribution center. The distribution center still holds the name of the original factory, but it is no longer the garment factory that employed approximately 1,100 workers. The distribution center employs fewer than 100 workers. The unionized textile mill, still in operation, employs roughly 600. As a result of the agreement between Fruit of the Loom and the CGT union in Honduras, more than 7,000 workers were employed in unionized facilities in Honduras. The company has eliminated 90 percent of those positions.