Economy & Trade, Headlines, Human Rights, Labour, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America

LABOUR: T-Shirt Maker Must Resume Talks on Honduras Plant – Groups

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Jul 21 2004 (IPS) - Labour organisations are calling on one of North America’s largest T-shirt makers to reverse its decision to close a factory in Honduras and resume talks over flawed working conditions in the plant that were detailed in recent inspections.

Gildan Activewear shocked the industry last week when it announced it would shut its El Progreso factory and end discussions over recent audits by two U.S.-based organisations – the Fair Labour Association (FLA) and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).

The closing is scheduled for Sep. 30 and would throw 1,800 employees out of work.

“What we hope is that Gildan will fully remediate the factory, and give the workers a clear indication and a real commitment to the FLA principles,” FLA Executive Director Rutledge Tufts told IPS.

“But closing a factory is a concern and (Gildan) would have to figure out a way to regain workers’ confidence that (the announced closure is) not retaliation,” he added.

Montreal-based Gildan employs about 1,200 workers in Canada and 9,200 people in factories that it either owns or contracts work to in Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

The firm has grown phenomenally in the past dozen years by making blank T-shirts that it sells to universities and other institutions, which then imprint logos on them.

But it has also been plagued by allegations that it does not respect international standards for working conditions, particularly in Honduras but also in its Montreal operations, which Gildan has reduced over the years.

The company manufactures 500 million shirts a year, giving it 29 percent of the North American market share in blank T-shirts.

The family-owned business joined FLA as a “participating company” in October 2003, one month before one of Canada’s largest pension plans, the union-owned Solidarity Labour Fund in Quebec province, announced it was withdrawing its 68-million-dollar (U.S.) investment in Gildan because of firings at the El Progreso factory.

In December, the Toronto-based activist Maquila Solidarity Network, the Canadian Labour Congress (which represents 2.5 million workers) and the Federation of Honduran Workers (FITH) filed a complaint with the FLA about the firing of employees at the plant.

The three organisations filed a similar complaint Jan. 6 with another inspection body, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC).

The complaint alleged that on Oct. 20, 2003, El Progreso management fired two workers, Santos Catalino Romero and Saul Bautista, who were leading a unionising drive at the plant. Another 37 workers were fired Nov. 4, including one who was six months pregnant, a move explicitly prohibited in Honduras’ labour code, according to the complaint.

Until last week, Gildan was engaged in discussions over the findings of an inspection at El Progreso by the FLA and concerning a WRC audit that did not include an on-site visit.

“The information we were getting from Honduras is that things were improving,” said MSN Coordinator Lynda Yanz in an interview. “We were expecting a different announcement.”

Although neither FLA or WRC has publicly released the audit results, Yanz said she has was told by informal sources that problems documented in the reports include those outlined in a MSN report last year, such as Gildan not paying proper overtime, allegations of sexual harassment and the company erecting barriers to freedom of association.

Since November 2002, Gildan had fired more than 100 workers at El Progreso, a sewing factory, for backing efforts to form a union, MSN added in the report.

“Our experience with Gildan is that freedom of association is the one (issue) that rings alarm bells,” said Yanz. “We’re not trying to push (workers) to have a union. What we’re trying to ensure is that Gildan recognise international workers’ rights conventions.”

The company says the closure is strictly a business decision, and that it will continue working with FLA to improve working conditions.

“We’ve committed to the FLA and WRC that the deficiencies that they may have found in their audits have either been corrected or will be corrected and will also, if you like, serve as benchmarks to use in our other facilities in Honduras,” said Stephane LeMay, vice-president of public and legal affairs.

Tufts said the FLA has a policy – which it has never used before – that if a member company does not follow through with measures to tackle the problems outlined in an inspection, the board of directors can put it on probation for 90 days, and then decide if the firm has made sufficient corrective efforts or remove it from the association.

“If a company closes a factory or, abandons or leaves – if it doesn’t own the factory – that could be an indicator the company is trying to avoid freedom of association. It’s not proof, but it could be,” added Tufts.

FLA companies agree to follow a code of conduct, which includes: – employees’ right to freedom of association and collective bargaining; – a salary equal to the country’s minimum wage or the industry standard, whichever is higher; – no more than 12 hours overtime in one week and one day off in each seven-day period, except in exceptional cases.

Both Tufts and Yanz stressed that they expect apparel companies to have problems in their workplaces. “If you approach the situation with the notion that there are no problems, then you’re never going to solve them,” said Tufts.

For example, in one of more than two dozen reports on conditions in Nike factories worldwide, FLA monitors who visited a plant in India in August 2003 wrote that not all workers had certificates proving they had reached minimum working age. “In doubtful cases, dental inspection is being organised” to determine ages, they added.

On the issue of freedom of association at the plant, a sports-shoe factory operated jointly with Reebok, monitors said a management-created “workers forum” in reality existed only on paper. “Many workers feel insecure in voicing their grievances with the management for fear of losing their job,” they reported.

Companies like Nike and GAP, “accept that there are problems,” said Yanz. But Gildan, for five years, has “just denied that they’ve done anything wrong.”

But LeMay said in an interview Gildan acknowledges problems. “Let’s face it, there are issues that have been raised (in the audits); they are not uncommon for a company of our size operating in different countries with many thousands of employees – but nothing would be major enough to lead us to make that type of decision (to close the factory).”