Viewing all content tagged: Covid-19

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Eco Base Ltd.

Country: Cambodia
Issues: Covid-19, Wage Theft

Dignity Knitter Ltd. and Eco Base Ltd. are sister factories in Takhmao City in Kandal Province, Cambodia. They supplied Arcadia, Debenhams, John Lewis, Lidl, Mango, Marks & Spencer, Next, and Urban Outfitters, before closing in April 2020, firing more than 1,100 workers, and failing to pay them $2.2 million in legally mandated compensation. Workers at…

Dragon Sweater Ltd.

Country: Bangladesh
Issues: Covid-19, Wage Theft

Dragon Sweater Ltd., a supplier to Lidl, New Yorker, and Woolworths, fired at least 500 workers—about half its workforce—in March 2020 and failed to pay them an estimated $133,200 in severance. In all, workers received barely a fifth of what they were legally owed. Since the closure, Dragon Group, which owned the factory, has continuously…

Dignity Knitter Ltd.

Country: Cambodia
Issues: Covid-19, Wage Theft

Dignity Knitter Ltd. and Eco Base Ltd. are sister factories in Takhmao City in Kandal Province, Cambodia. They supplied Arcadia, Debenhams, John Lewis, Lidl, Mango, Marks & Spencer, Next, and Urban Outfitters, before closing in April 2020, firing more than 1,100 workers, and failing to pay them $2.2 million in legally mandated compensation. Workers at…

Diganta Sweaters Ltd.

Country: Bangladesh
Issues: Covid-19, Wage Theft

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…

Crystal Martin

Country: Cambodia
Issues: Covid-19, Wage Theft

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…

A-One BD Ltd.

Country: Bangladesh
Issues: Covid-19, Wage Theft

A-One BD Ltd., an Italian-owned supplier to Benetton and Next, located in the Dhaka Export Processing Zone, closed in April 2020 leaving 1,400 workers unemployed. For the first three months of 2020, the factory did not pay workers’ wages. After protesting, they received payment for only two of the three months. In addition, after A-One…

Report: Pandemic-Era Severance Theft at Garment Factories Exceeds Half a Billion Dollars

Country: Global
Issues: Covid-19, Wage Theft

WRC Finds Violations in Supply Chains of Gap, Next, Walmart, and MoreFashion Brands Urged to Form Severance Guarantee Fund to Pay Fired Workers’ Stolen Earnings Tens of thousands of garment workers at factories producing for leading fashion brands, who were fired during the Covid-19 pandemic, are being denied terminal compensation, in violation of the law…

Fired, Then Robbed: Fashion brands’ complicity in wage theft during Covid-19

Country: Global
Issues: Covid-19, Wage Theft

Tens of thousands of garment workers at factories producing for leading fashion brands, who were fired during the Covid-19 pandemic, are being denied terminal compensation, in violation of the law and the labor rights obligations of the brands and retailers whose clothes they sewed. This research report exposes severance pay theft at dozens of factories, all named in the report, where workers were robbed of an average of more than a thousand dollars (US) per person.

The WRC’s data represent a modest fraction of the factory closures in the industry, indicating that the severance theft the report reveals is the tip of the iceberg. The WRC estimates that the millions of garment workers terminated globally during the pandemic have been robbed of more than half a billion dollars in earnings since the pandemic’s outset.