#PayYourWorkers
Victories

The Pay Your Workers campaign has secured over $10 million in unpaid wages and severance stolen from workers who were fired during the pandemic.

In March 2023, after 18 months of struggle, including international campaign actions, press conferences, and protests, workers at the Croatian factory Orljava won their fight for severance. Orljava is a garment factory in eastern Croatia, which produced business shirts for the German high-quality shirt brand Olymp for over 50 years. When Covid-19 hit, Olymp began drastically cutting orders at the Orljava factory, forcing the factory to begin laying off some of its 300 workers. By April of 2021, Olymp - the factory’s largest buyer, representing 80% of production at the factory - stopped making orders altogether. Orljava went bankrupt and laid off the remaining 172 workers. The 237 former Orljava workers will receive a total of €491,074.40, more than €2000 per worker, from the Croatian government, which owned the factory. This is a precedent-setting victory, not just for the Orljava workers and their union Novi Sindikat, but for all workers at government-owned factories. In October 2023, former Orljava workers filed a complaint at the German OECD National Contact Point against Olymp, which did not contribute a cent to the compensation, for damage caused by the delayed payment in times of high inflation.

In February 2023, adidas supplier Trax Apparel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, has provided full back pay and rehire opportunities to all eight union leaders and activists fired nearly three years ago. In June 2020, Trax Apparel suspended, then terminated, 368 workers, including the leaders of a newly formed independent union, citing a need to downsize. By December 2020, management had offered to rehire most of the workers affected by the downsizing, but refused to rehire any of the union leaders and activists.

These eight workers had formed a union to seek better working conditions. Firing them is the most effective way of silencing them and any other worker wanting to stand up for their rights. After campaigning by the Pay Your Workers campaign, including activism by students at US universities sponsored by Adidas, the union has confirmed that the case has been fully resolved.

The return of union leaders and Trax's commitment to stop discrimination will pave the way for ongoing union organizing at the factory, providing hope for thousands of Cambodian workers seeking better working conditions.

In March 2023, JNB Global, a Target supplier, has provided all legally owed severance and back pay to seven workers who were unlawfully fired in February 2021, and restored severance and seniority rights for its entire workforce of 400 employees. During the pandemic, workers had been forced to sign new contracts with falsified (later) hiring dates, thus stripping them of built up benefits. Those who refused were dismissed unlawfully.

After engagement and campaigning, including solidarity by retail workers at Target stores, JNB replaced the JNB Global workers’ illegal contracts with new ones that correctly state their original dates of hire, restoring the workers' full rights to severance and other seniority-based benefits.

After months of worker protests and campaigning by activists internationally, in May 2022 it was announced that Victoria’s Secret provided $8.3 million owed in severance to Thai workers who sewed their lingerie. To our knowledge, this was the largest case of severance theft ever at an individual garment factory – and thus this is the biggest severance case victory to date. 

Receiving this back pay makes a huge difference for more than 1,250 workers and their families – many of whom had to take out loans to pay their rent or feed their kids after the factory suddenly closed in March 2021.

Two additional brands that sourced from the factory, Torrid and Lane Bryant, both part of Sycamore Partners, were unresponsive to the campaign and did not contribute any support to the workers.

We extend our deep gratitude to the nearly 50,000 people who took action and signed our petition in support of the Brilliant Alliance workers. Now, we call on the buyers at Brilliant Alliance – and all other major apparel brands and retailers – to ensure workers are never again left penniless when factories close by negotiating a binding agreement with unions.

In April 2020, a minimum wage increase went into effect in the Indian state of Karnataka, one of the country's largest centers of garment manufacturing. Garment factory owners producing for leading apparel brands refused to pay. As a result, 400,000 garment workers across over a thousand factories were cheated of the legal minimum wage – amounting to nearly $60 million in back wages owed.

By March 2022, after 22 months of refusing to do so, the major Karnataka garment manufacturers had finally committed to pay the legal minimum wage, along with all arrears owed, to their workers. As of July 2022, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) has confirmed an estimated $23.1 million in payments by 21 manufacturers to nearly 200,000 current employees, with 16 of the manufacturers having paid in full.

Workers report that the impact of not receiving this increase was concrete and significant: reduced access to food staples, lost housing, lost schooling for their children.

According to the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), this was the worst wage theft they had ever seen in the global garment industry and it resulted in a reduction, in real terms, in workers’ already precarious standard of living.

Brands were aware of the theft and had allowed it to continue for nearly two years. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre compiled brand responses here.

During February 2022, in a major breakthrough in the efforts of Garment and Textile Workers’ Union in Karnataka, combined with growing pressure on brands from activists around the world, Shahi Exports, the biggest garment manufacturer in India, agreed to pay their workers what they are owed. (For more context, check out coverage by the Guardian and VICE News.) After this first victory, we kept up the pressure on brands and soon more suppliers committed to pay!

After more than a year of efforts, approximately 200 former employees of the Industrias Florenzi factory in El Salvador in December 2021 won their fight for severance benefits and unpaid wages after their factory closed in July 2020. One of the products the workers made were medical scrubs for US-based Barco Uniforms, including Barco's popular "Grey's Anatomy" branded scrubs, which it sells under a license from Disney.

The campaign, which brought healthcare workers and women’s rights organizations together in solidarity with Salvadoran garment workers, convinced Barco to make a contribution of US$ 1 million to the workers. This payment marks an important achievement for the global #PayYourWorkers campaign and will help the former Industrias Florenzi workers, and their families, recover from the economic toll of having been denied many months’ worth of compensation by the factory’s owner when their plant closed.

In Sri Lanka, workers in garment factories across the country have neither been paid their full wages nor the bonuses they’re counting on to supplement their poverty wages. At the Next Manufacturing Ltd (NML) factory, wholly owned by the UK brand Next, workers staged a walk out in December 2020, because the factory cancelled their new years’ bonuses. The workers’ strike worked and they eventually received their bonuses. However, afterwards, when the workers decided to form a union, the factory leadership refused to recognise it. Despite management intimidation, almost half the workers joined. The struggle of the workers continued in the months since, to defend their labour rights on their own against companies such as Next. Finally, by June 2021 both Next and the NML factory recognised their union, meaning that workers can now collectively raise their voice to fight for their full wages and their rights. After long and hard negotiations the union (a branch union of the Free Trade Zones and General Service Employees Union) on October 2021 finally signed a collective agreement with the factory management, winning several employee demands. The workers won this struggle by standing together and persisting in the face of challenges. They were supported by activists in the UK and all over the world who held Next to account.