The timing of a pair of complementary reports about South Asia’s garment industry by Amnesty International, just before Black Friday, was completely intentional, said Dominique Muller, a regional researcher on workers’ rights at the human rights organization’s South Asia regional office.
Neither do their titles—“Stitched Up: Denial of Freedom of Association for Garment Workers in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka” and “Abandoned by Fashion: The Urgent Need for Fashion Brands to Champion Workers’ Rights”—leave much of their subject matter, or the direction in which their fingers are pointed, to the imagination.
More from Sourcing Journal
But the two papers—and the decades of research by labor rights organizations, women’s groups and trade unions that underpins them—were long overdue, said Muller, who also serves as policy director for the U.K. garment industry advocacy group Labour Behind the Label.
Amnesty International is more closely associated with campaigning for freedom of expression and the release of political prisoners around the world, but its South Asian team felt alarms go off after the rash of order cancellations at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic led to mass firings, furloughed employment and reduced hours that pushed millions of predominantly female garment workers to the brink of starvation.
“And one of the things that we started looking at was what are the main causes of the continuing precarity of employment for garment workers in Asia, whether in terms of wages or other contributing factors,” Muller said. “We wanted to focus on areas we could add value to.”
The “fundamental individual and collective human right” of freedom of association, meaning the ability of workers to form and join organizations of their choosing, was an obvious choice because it’s been a key enabler and driver of change, she said. When that is systematically throttled in countries such as Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, where apparel production accounts for an estimated 40 percent of manufacturing jobs, abusive working conditions, excessive working hours and poverty wages become normalized.
“As we looked more into it, while we could see progress toward greater respect for freedom of association, there hasn’t been a great deal of evidence of progress,” Muller said. “And we’re seeing a lot of repression of trade union rights and, in some cases, increasing repression, both in the countries where the brands are headquartered and in the production countries where they source.”
While the reports don’t seek to shame any particular brand or retailer—the entire industry is at fault, Muller said—they’re also unequivocal in their conviction that fashion purveyors can take meaningful steps to alleviate the low wages, overwork, harassment, gender discrimination and sexual violence that are endemic to business models that value commercial and price considerations over ethical sourcing decisions that transcend “tick-box auditing.”
Despite touting codes of conduct and human rights policies that lay out their commitments to the right to freedom of association, for instance, most of the 21 household names that Amnesty International surveyed could count few to no independent trade unions in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Marks and Spencer, to give an example, only had five unions among its 172 listed clothing suppliers but none at factories in India or Pakistan. Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing had three unions among 32 factories in Bangladesh, two among 23 factories in India and zero at its single supplier in Pakistan. Of H&M Group’s 145 factories in Bangladesh, 29 had unions. In India, 93 of its factories were listed with eight unions but none of its 31 factories in Pakistan.
Little surprises Muller any more, but something that struck her from interviews she conducted was how the “consistency of stories” from organizing workers about the threats and harassment they faced—even the microaggressions that workers who merely thought of joining a union were subjected to—“contrasted so vividly with the reading of brand reports on how they’re committed to human rights.”
“Yet when you drill down, there are very few details,” she said. “And when you look at the parallel universe between what the brands say and what the workers say, it is such a stark reminder that really we haven’t made much progress and that the repression of workers’ right to organize is such an impediment to making any sort of sustainable progress.”
A cudgel of repression
Without freedom of association, workers have little power or voice and even less recourse for redress if they’re victimized, which is a clear breach of international laws and mores. According to the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, everyone has the right to freedom of association, including the right to form and join trade unions. The ICESCR Committee goes further, saying that “trade union rights, freedom of association and the right to strike are crucial means to introduce, maintain and defend just and favorable conditions of work.”
“The issue of freedom of association and successful worker organizing cuts through health and safety,” Muller said. “I mean, the unions are there in the factory 24/7. They are with the workers. They are made up of the workers. They see the dangers. They should have the right to call out those dangers. Without that, it means that workers are often powerless to speak up about these things.”
As “new forms of working,” such as zero-hour and informal employment contracts, proliferate, Muller said, unions face increasing challenges in organizing what are essentially temporary workers. This is compounded by employer or government hostility. Amnesty International identified for major ways the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining are being repressed: old-fashioned union busting through various means, retaliation from factory management, the replacement of legitimate worker representatives with pro-management bodies, or “yellow” unions, and obstacles to the right the strike in certain special economic or free trade zones that bar industrial action.
Criminalizing union activity, too, is a worrying trend that goes against core International Labour Organization standards. It was only last month that Bangladesh’s interim government abandoned all outstanding criminal charges against tens of thousands of garment workers who were involved in the minimum wage protests at the close of 2023. In Cambodia and Myanmar, labor rights defenders have been arrested on trumped-up or nonexistent infractions.
“And it’s a weapon that states use,” she said. “In a sense, they use both passive oppression of unions through the restriction of who can join, when they can join, how they can meet? And then we have a much more active form of criminalization of unionists, of union activity, including strikes. Both of those forces together create a climate of fear for ordinary workers, and the workers that do stand up face detention, jail, or, at the very least, blacklisting.”
Without freedom of association, the “promise of progressive realization of economic rights” remains a myth built on colonial structures of the extraction of cheap and frequently throwaway labor in the global South to generate profits for shareholders in the global North, she said. Poverty, employment insecurity and exploitative working conditions are not so much an “unexpected byproduct” of the industry, but an “integral part of it.”
And the excuse that brands don’t own their factories and are bound by national regulations doesn’t wash anymore, Muller said.
“It hasn’t washed for at least 10 years, I think since Rana Plaza, when it was clear that brands should be held responsible,” she said. “Even before that, with the UN Guiding Principles, it was very clear that businesses do have a responsibility to protect and promote human rights. And I think what’s happened now is we have a situation where brands would never deny all responsibility, but they would choose to delay any active engagement with suppliers or cut ties without thinking of the impact on the workers.”
What Muller would like to see from brands is greater transparency, which can result in increased accountability, in terms of the progress they’ve made in promoting the right to freedom of association in their supply chains, such as greater engagement with trade unions. She’d like to see them shed voluntary initiatives, which she said haven’t changed the structure of the industry, and opt for legally binding agreements such as the Dindigul Agreement to Eliminate Gender-Based Violence and Harassment and the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Garment Industry that frame due diligence as more than a perfunctory or compliance exercise.
Most of all, Muller wants businesses to employ “proactive” ethical sourcing strategies that reward suppliers that respect the right to freedom of association, and governments in the global North to enact legislation that holds companies responsible for their indirect operations worldwide, not just the ones they have control over in their own countries.
“If brands really wanted to commit, they should be choosing suppliers with unions,” she said. “They should be working at a global level with all their different departments. They should be putting in KPIs for senior leadership in terms of making progress toward human rights.”
Which brings us back to Black Friday, which has grown from a post-Thanksgiving bargain hunt for Americans to an international paean to overconsumption.
“We really wanted to make a focus this time of year,” Muller said. “When we see people shopping for Black Friday, when we see brands encouraging consumerism, we want them to take a moment to look at who is actually making the clothes, what conditions workers are facing and what responsibilities they have.”