Leading Uniform Maker Won’t Require Haitian Supplier Factory to Rehire Worker Leaders
Despite political chaos, rampant gang violence, and a near total breakdown in the rule of law, Haiti has remained a significant production hub for employee workwear for the US market. This has been due to trade preferences and because the poverty-stricken country has some of the lowest wages for garment workers in the Western Hemisphere. Despite this crisis, some US workwear brands have been helping garment workers in Haiti secure their legal rights. Unfortunately, some others, including Cintas, are allowing those rights to be trampled.
Last year, the WRC reported that two major US workwear brands, Aramark and Edwards Garments, stepped up to help Haitian workers who made their products. These brands ensured that former employees of their supplier, Horizon Manufacturing, received unpaid compensation they were owed after the factory closed.
However, Cintas, another major US maker of employee uniforms, has refused to secure full remedy for serious worker rights abuses at one of its Haitian supplier factories, MBI Haiti. Cintas is persisting in this refusal even though another leading US workwear brand, Workwear Outfitters, just reported that it has cut business ties with the same factory.
A Worker Leader at Cintas’s Supplier, MBI Haiti, Wore a Union Shirt and Held a Meeting—Then She and Her Coworkers Were Fired
The violations Cintas has refused to require the MBI Haiti factory to correct concern a mass retaliatory firing in 2023 of worker leaders of a plant-level union. In April 2023, a MBI Haiti manager reprimanded a worker who is a plant-level leader of the union, GOSTTRA (Textile Export Workers’ Association), for wearing a union polo shirt to work. The worker wore the union polo shirt because she was going to attend an offsite union meeting later the same day.
After returning to work, the union leader organized a break-time meeting in the area of the factory where workers eat their lunch. The meeting was attended by seven members of the union’s leadership committee and other workers.
The workers reported that, while they were meeting, a factory manager stood near them and filmed the meeting participants on her phone. Several days later, MBI Haiti dismissed most of the workers who attended the meeting, including six out of seven members of the union’s in-plant leadership committee.
Factory’s Claim That Firings Were Non-Retaliatory Was Obviously Untruthful, Cintas Chose to Believe It Anyway
When the WRC later asked MBI Haiti’s management why these workers were dismissed, the management claimed that they were terminated for solely economic reasons, as part of a downsizing of the factory’s workforce. The factory management reported that a reduction in orders from customers had required the factory to lay off 53 employees—out of a total factory workforce of approximately 1,500 employees.
The WRC consulted with a professional statistician regarding the probability that a layoff affecting less than four percent of the factory’s total workforce (53 out of 1,500 employees) would naturally result in the dismissal of six out of seven (86 percent) of the workers who made up the union’s in-plant leadership. The statistician reported that there was a less than one in 10,000 chance (0.01 percent) that such a layoff would produce such a result absent an intentional targeting of the workers who made up the union’s leadership committee.
MBI Haiti also later claimed that until the WRC contacted Cintas about the firings, its management had no idea that any of the employees it terminated were affiliated with the GOSTTRA union. This claim was also obviously untrue. The WRC shared with Cintas a letter that the GOSTTRA union wrote to the factory on union letterhead immediately after the firing, protesting the dismissal of workers who were members of its leadership committee. Moreover, the WRC also found that workers at the factory had been publicly associated with the GOSTTRA union since 2017.
Finally, the WRC found that this was not even the first time that MBI Haiti’s management had tried to fire the GOSTTRA union leader who organized the break time meeting. In fact, in 2020, the management dealt directly with the GOSTTRA union in relation to an earlier attempt by management to terminate this same worker—the same worker whom the factory management also admonished for wearing a union polo shirt before it fired her.
Given these clear falsehoods on the part of factory management, the WRC found that MBI Haiti’s claim that it was not aware that these workers were union leaders when it selected them for layoff lacked credibility. Cintas, however, has apparently chosen to believe its supplier’s denial that it targeted workers for en masse dismissal in violation of their associational rights—even in the face of the statistical near-impossibility that their supplier’s denial is truthful.
At the time that the violations occurred, MBI Haiti was also a supplier to another major US employee uniform maker, Workwear Outfitters. The latter has recently reported that it is no longer sourcing from MBI Haiti.
Cintas Has Refused to Require the Factory to Reinstate Unlawfully Fired Worker Leaders
The WRC shared the findings of our investigation with Cintas, the factory’s primary buyer, and called on Cintas to require the factory to reinstate these employees with back pay. However, despite extensive attempts at engagement by the WRC, Cintas has been unwilling to require the factory to comply with its Code of Conduct by remedying these clear violations of the rights of the workers who made their products.
The unwillingness of Cintas to require its supplier, MBI Haiti, to reinstate the fired worker union leaders from the GOSTTRA union is particularly concerning because the factory has a documented track record of illegally firing other worker union leaders. The WRC engaged extensively with Cintas regarding these other firings and Cintas did, in fact, require the factory to provide full back pay to those affected workers—who were also reinstated.
In this case, six plant-level leaders of a different union that has members at the factory, SOTA-BO (Union of Textile and Apparel Workers), were also unlawfully fired in April 2023, the same month that MBI Haiti terminated the GOSTTRA worker leaders. After investigations by the WRC and other labor rights bodies found the former dismissals to be illegal, MBI Haiti did reinstate the SOTA-BO worker leaders, but it only paid them a portion of the back wages they were due.
When the WRC called on Cintas to require MBI Haiti to pay the workers their remaining back wages, the factory did agree to pay the six reinstated SOTA-BO leaders their outstanding back pay, amounting to more than a year’s wages for each worker. The SOTA-BO workers received their payments in November 2024, approximately a year and a half after their dismissals.
Two and a Half Years after They Were Illegally Fired, Union Leaders from Cintas’s Supplier MBI Haiti Are Still Waiting for Justice
Although the worker leaders from the SOTA-BO union that were illegally fired by MBI Haiti were eventually reinstated and received back wages, no such remedy has been provided to the fired GOSTTRA worker leaders. These workers were unlawfully fired by MBI Haiti almost two and a half years ago. The ongoing failure of Cintas to require their supplier, MBI Haiti, to correct this retaliation exposes the brand’s lack of genuine commitment to the human rights of the Haitian workers who make workwear that Cintas supplies to companies in the United States.
Photo credit: Marcel Crozet / ILO