Factory: Texport Creation
Key Buyers: Gap
Last Updated: 2021
Case Summary
The apparel industry’s chronically low wages left most garment workers with no savings on the eve of the Covid-19 crisis. Since most governments in apparel exporting countries provide little or no unemployment benefits, the only thing standing between an out-of-work garment worker and immediate poverty for her family are the legally mandated severance benefits that most garment workers are due upon termination.
Research by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) reveals that many garment workers who were fired during the pandemic have been 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.
Texport Creation is one of the 31 export garment factories identified in the WRC’s report, Fired, Then Robbed: Fashion brands’ complicity in wage theft during Covid-19, which still owed workers legally mandated terminal compensation as of April 2021.
In May 2020, Texport Creation dismissed 750 workers when it closed. As of April 2021, these workers were still waiting for $216,334 in legally owed compensation.
Texport Creation was a sewing facility located at No. 26/1, A2, 26/1, B2, T.M Industrial Estate, Kenchenahalli, R.R Nagar, Mysore Road, Bangalore, India. Gap told the WRC in a January 2021 letter that it had verified the severance calculation statements for each worker and documents signed by workers stating that the severance had been paid, and Gap had concluded that all terminal compensation was properly provided. Evidence shows that workers received other terminal compensation but were not paid severance.
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