Amplifying worker voices in the garment and sportswear industry
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24 April 2024 will mark the 11th anniversary of the fashion industry’s worst tragedy: the collapse of the Rana Plaza building, killing 1,138 people. The catastrophic death and injury toll was caused by a deadly mix of fashion brands ignoring dangerous factory conditions, poverty wages, and centrally, constraints on workers’ ability to organise collectively. While unprecedented progress has been made to make factories safer, the brutal crackdown on workers’ rights still unfolding in response to protests to increase the minimum wage has shown that apparel brands producing in Bangladesh are still failing to ensure that the basic rights of their workers are respected.
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On 10 February 2024, workers of the Sumithra Hasalaka factory in Sri Lanka organised by the Free Trade Zones & General Services Employees Union (FTZ & GSEU) startedstriking for a wage offer that meets their cost of living. Two months on, these brave workers’ strike continues in the face of harassment and intimidation, financial hardship, and during the most important family holiday of the year, the Sinhala and Tamil new year. International brands sourcing from the factory group have taken insufficient action to ensure their suppliertreatsworkers better.
Workers at a Levi’s supplier in Türkiyehave faced harassment, attacks, arrests, and dismissal for exercising their right to chose their own union representation. Despite committing to the union that it would pressure the factory management to rehire unlawfully terminated union members, four months since the start of the conflict, Levi’s is still producing clothes at the factory and has stopped communicating with the union and labour rights advocates supporting them.
In the wake of the fundamentally flawed Bangladesh minimum wage protest of 2023 that led to the setting of another poverty wage, the government of Bangladesh cracked down hard on workers’ protests. Criminal charges, often filed by suppliers to major international brands, are now hanging over the heads of tens of thousands of workers. Yet, through recent industry statements, brands attempt to wash their hands of the responsibility for both the setting of yet another wage that leaves workers unable to put enough food on the table and of the legal threats now facing them.