WRC Factory Investigation

V.K. Garment Co. Ltd.

Factory: V.K. Garment Co. Ltd.

Key Buyers: Tesco

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.

V.K. Garment 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 August 2020, V.K. Garment dismissed 136 workers. As of April 2021, these workers were still waiting for $1,138,000 in legally owed compensation.

V.K. Garment Co. Ltd., located at 608 Moo 7, Maegu, Mae Sot District, Tak Province, Thailand, is a sewing facility that also owns a knitting subsidiary and an embroidery subsidiary. Tesco disclosed V.K. Garment in its August 2020 and October 2019 supplier lists.

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