WASHINGTON – Millions of dollars in wages have been withheld from garment workers globally by factories contracted to major fashion brands, claims a new report. The findings, published by the Worker Rights Consortium, implicate many household clothing retailers, including Amazon, Nike, Walmart, Inditex and Next.
WRC focused on 31 export garment factories in nine countries and concluded that a total of 37,637 fired workers were not paid the full severance pay they legally earned, which totalled US$39.8m. However, they claim this is the top of the ice-berg and estimate that “total severance theft in the global garment industry during the Covid-19 pandemic is between US$500m and US$850m.”
At the factories which it focused on, WRC claims workers were “robbed of an average of more than a thousand dollars (US) per person.”
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