Factory workers make sportswear for a U.S. brand at a maquila plant in the San Bartolo free trade zone in the city of Ilopango in eastern El Salvador. The factory employs 350 workers on each eight-hour shift, 80 percent of them women, who earn minimum wage. Credit: Edgar Romero/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Mar 23 2015 (IPS)

Textile companies that make clothing for transnational brands in El Salvador are accused of forging alliances with gang members to make death threats against workers and break up their unions, according to employees who talked to IPS and to international organisations.

Workers at maquila or maquiladora plants – which import materials and equipment duty-free for assembly or manufacturing for re-export – speaking on condition of anonymity said that since 2012 the threats have escalated, as part of the generalised climate of violence in this Central American country.

“They would call me on the phone and tell me to quit the union, to stop being a trouble-maker,” one worker at the LD El Salvador company in the San Marcos free trade zone, a complex of factories to the south of the Salvadoran capital, told IPS.

She has worked as a sewing machine operator since 2004 and belongs to the Sindicato de la Industria Textil Salvadoreña (SITS) textile industry union. Some 780 people work for LD El Salvador, a Korean company that produces garments for the firms Náutica and Walmart.

“They told me they were homeboys (gang members) and that if I didn’t quit the union my body would show up hanging from one of the trees outside the company,” she said.“They would call me on the phone and tell me to quit the union, to stop being a trouble-maker. They said they were homeboys (gang members) and that if I didn’t quit the union my body would show up hanging from one of the trees outside the company,” -- A worker at the LD El Salvador company

She added that LD executives hired gang members to make sure the threats directly reached the workers who belong to SITS, on the factory premises.

The warnings have had a chilling effect, because only 60 of the 155 workers affiliated with the union are still members, she said. Many quit, scared of falling victim to the young gangs, organised crime groups known in Central America as “maras”, which are responsible for a large part of the murders every day in this impoverished country.

El Salvador, population 6.3 million, is one of the most violent countries in the world. In 2014 there were 3,912 murders – a rate of 63 homicides per 100,000 population, compared to a Latin American average of 29 and a global average of 6.2.

“They would call me and say my body would be found in a black bag if I didn’t leave the union….since these were the first calls that we were receiving, I was really nervous and worried,” another worker who is still in SITS told IPS.

The textile maquiladora plants operate in the country’s 17 free trade zones, where companies are given tax breaks and other incentives, and do not pay tariffs on imported inputs. The clients are international brands like Nike, Puma or Adidas.

In 2014, the industry employed over 74,000 people, the great majority of them women, who represent 12 percent of the 636,000 jobs in the private sector. Its exports amounted to 2.4 billion dollars, half of El Salvador’s total sales abroad, according to industry statistics.

Since the maquiladora boom began in the 1990s, the factories have been criticised for inhumane treatment and violations of the labour rights of workers.

“One of the most widely violated rights is the right to unionise,” the secretary of organisation of the Federación Sindical de El Salvador trade union federation, Reynaldo Ortiz, told IPS.

“And now they’re using death threats to try to break up the unions,” he said.

In January, two U.S. groups, the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State University and the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), published “Unholy Alliances: How Employers in El Salvador’s Garment Industry Collude with a Corrupt Labor Federation, Company Unions and Violent Gangs to Suppress Workers’ Rights”.

The report cited specific cases of intimidation of trade unionists by gang members.

“These threats pose particular concern and have an especially chilling effect on freedom of association, both because of the country’s long history of murders of union activists and because Salvadoran society generally is plagued by gang violence,” says the 46-page document.

According to the report, several incidents occurred in January 2013 to workers at F&D, a company from Taiwan, which is also in the San Marcos free trade zone.

On one occasion two F&D managers, accompanied by a gang member, approached a number of workers who were talking outside the factory and visibly identified to the gang member the employees who were union leaders.

One of the LD workers said the participation of the maras is so blatant that during a November 2013 meeting of trade unionists with gang members, held to explain the workers’ struggles and problems, some of the gang members showed up with company managers.

In January 2014 Juan Carlos Sánchez, one of the employees who took part in that meeting, was killed in murky circumstances, the LD worker said.

She added that although they filed reports with the attorney general’s office, the investigation went nowhere.

IPS was unable to obtain comments from representatives of F&D or LD with regard to these issues. Nor did anyone at the Labour Ministry respond to requests for interviews on the matter.

Another case of threats involved activists with the Sindicato de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras, Sastres, Costureras y Similares (Sitrasacosi) textile workers union, active in companies that include the Nemtex textile plant on the west side of San Salvador.

“Armed men would wait in cars outside the factory when people were going off shift; they never said anything, it was more like intimidation, psychological pressure,” said a member of the union.

She said that in February a leader of the union, who works in Nemtex, received death threats from gang members who visited his home. In late February he fled to the United States.

The Sitrasacosi activist said the management and business owners dislike the unions and are trying to avoid collective bargaining agreements.

She said the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Empresa Confecciones Gama, another textile workers union, had been negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with the company, which would have been the first reached in the maquila textile industry.

But the company suddenly shut down in June 2011, leaving more than 270 workers without jobs.

“They preferred to close the factory rather than sign a collective bargaining agreement…in their view it would have set a bad precedent,” the Sitrasacosi member added.

She said that thanks to the efforts of the International Union League for Brand Responsibility, which lobbies for the labour rights of workers who make products for multinational brands around the world, in December 2012 the owners of Gama paid indemnification for the closure.

Other labour and human rights continue to be violated by maquila textile plants, Carmen Urquilla, with the Concertación por un Empleo Digno para las Mujeres women’s labour rights organisation, told IPS.

For example, there are companies that keep the social security payments they dock from the workers’ pay – a phenomenon that continues to occur, she said, although on a smaller scale than in years past.

Forced labour is also widespread in the maquilas, added Urquilla, where the women have to work 12 hours a day to meet the high production targets set for them.

They are not paid for the extra hours they work, but merely receive a 10-dollar bonus for meeting their target, she said. Minimum wage in the maquila textile plants is 210 dollars a month.

“It’s heavy work, a lot of women suffer disabilities for life, because of skeletal and muscle injuries in the shoulders or legs; some people can’t even dress themselves on their own,” Urquilla said.

A maquila worker who asked that the company she works for not be named told IPS that her target is 1,110 pairs of shirt sleeves in 10 hours.

“It’s really exhausting work,” she said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Twenty-five-year-old Razia is one of 2,500 survivors of the factory collapse in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 31 2013 (IPS)

Top U.S. companies are now in negotiations to agree on new safety standards for their clothing-producing contractors in Bangladesh, a month after a garment factory’s collapse in Dhaka killed more than 1,100 workers.

The move comes after these companies, most prominently including Walmart and Gap, refused to sign on to a fire and safety standards agreement, announced weeks ago, that has received wide backing among European companies. Yet labour advocates are disparaging the new talks, suggesting the results will likely not be binding and thus will not be able to ensure worker safety."They are still looking for political cover so they can preserve the very lucrative status quo.” -- Scott Nova of the Worker Rights Consortium

“Walmart is … undermining the constructive efforts of other companies,” Jyrki Raina, general-secretary for IndustriALL Global Union, an umbrella of unions with 50 million worldwide members that has led the European agreement process, said Friday. “The kind of voluntary initiative being put forward by Walmart and Gap has failed in the past and will again fail to protect Bangladeshi garment workers.”

The new discussions, announced Thursday, are being sponsored by the BipartisanPolicyCenter, a Washington think tank, and being co-chaired by two respected former U.S. senators, George Mitchell and Olympia Snowe. The negotiations also include several U.S. and Canadian trade associations.

“Over the next several weeks, we look forward to building on [past] efforts … and seeking input from key stakeholders to forge an effective response,” Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), said Thursday.

Currently, the process is aiming to come up with a final agreement on new standards for Bangladeshi contractor factories by July. (BPC did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

“We are hopeful that … these discussions will result in a plan for long-lasting change for the garment industry in Bangladesh,” Bill Chandler, vice-president of global corporate affairs for Gap, Inc. told IPS. “We believe the American alliance can be a powerful path forward to achieve lasting change in Bangladesh, and will build upon the work that is already underway.”

A spokesperson for Target also confirmed the company’s involvement in the BPC-facilitated talks process.

Contacted by IPS, a Walmart spokesperson emphasised that the company has already taken “a number of actions that meet or exceed other factory safety proposals”. But he also noted Walmart’s belief that “there is a need to partner with other stakeholders to improve the standards for workers across the industry”.

Nonbinding “not good enough”

This interest in entering into the new negotiations appears to be motivated particularly by public pressure following the companies’ refusal to sign on to the European Union accord, which now has more than 40 corporate backers, including three U.S. companies.

That agreement would include financing to upgrade factories as well as independent inspections. In addition to concerns over potential costs and the prospect of court litigation, a key sticking point for U.S. companies over the E.U. proposal has been that the agreement would be legally binding.

According to documents on Gap’s corporate website, for instance, in mid-May the company was “ready to sign on today with a modification to a single area – how disputes are resolved … With this single change, this global, historic agreement can move forward with a group of all retailers, not just those based in Europe.”

Yet it is because of this stance – reportedly repeated at a Gap shareholder meeting on May 21 – that observers are now sceptical that a company-led negotiations process will be able to result in strong, and legally enforceable, agreement.

“Forty retailers from all over the world … have agreed to a binding comprehensive safety plan for Bangladesh,” the AFL-CIO, one of the largest labour unions in the United States, said Friday, noting its “deep concern” about the new BPC-led talks.

“No amount of bipartisan window dressing can change the fact that Walmart and the Gap have refused to take this important step. This is a matter of life or death. Quite simply, nonbinding is just not good enough.”

Such concerns are heightened by the fact that, currently, no worker-rights organisation is included in the talks.

“This is the latest, and probably most sophisticated, in a series of industry public relations gambits designed to deflect attention from the real issue: the refusal of these companies to make a binding commitment to clean up their factories in Bangladesh,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, an advocacy group, told IPS in an e-mail.

“This shows the pressure these corporations are under and their recognition that the failed inspection schemes they have been touting no longer have any public credibility. Unfortunately, their goal has not changed: they are still looking for political cover so they can preserve the very lucrative status quo.”

Corporate-led process

Concerns over corporate-led international labour and safety programmes have received boosts from U.S. lawmakers in recent days, as well. Last week, Representative Sander Levin warned that the oversight process has “been left up to the retailers, suppliers and government all these years, and that hasn’t worked.”

On May 15, Levin and two dozen members of Congress wrote to Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, urging that her government put “the highest priority on aggressively enacting and enforcing comprehensive reforms … including the right to organize and form unions”. The lawmakers also noted, “it is critical that all key stakeholders take action”.

Reports in recent days have suggested that the U.S. State and Labour Departments are currently arguing over how hard to push the Bangladeshi government on these issues. Unions and some advocacy groups are pressuring the U.S. to revoke certain bilateral trade concessions given to Bangladesh, though critics say doing so would give up important leverage for change.

For now, Washington, seemingly led by the embassy in Dhaka, has chosen not to back the E.U. accord, although the U.S. State department says it is urging Bangladeshi officials to institute a suite of labour reforms.

“We need a lot more from the U.S. government – why the embassy has decided not to endorse the E.U. standards is beyond me,” Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, a watchdog group, told IPS.

“Of course, we have to remember that even the E.U. accord hasn’t put any emphasis on workers’ right to organise. It’s only workers themselves that can win their rights, and they can do so only once they have the right to organise and bargain collectively. The U.S. government needs to do far more on two issues: binding agreements on safety codes and the right to organise.”

Sixteen-year-old Parul, hailing from Dhaka's Batara slum, is paid about 15 dollars a month for her work in a garment factory. Also in the picture are her younger brothers and a cousin. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Katelyn Fossett
WASHINGTON, May 3 2013 (IPS)

Worker advocacy groups here are calling on some of the most high-profile U.S.-based clothing companies to make drastic reforms to their international labour practices in the wake of the factory collapse that killed more than 420 workers in Dhaka last week.

But critics say U.S. companies appear to be “meeting” these demands with increasingly creative ways to circumvent their core recommendations, by forming their own safety initiatives that rights groups say are essentially meaningless, or pulling out altogether to avoid the risk."What we see are token donations and empty promises that can’t be enforced." -- Scott Nova of the Workers Rights Consortium

“Any meaningful programme needs to be legally binding,” Liana Foxvog, communications director at the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“It needs to pay prices sufficient for ensuring compliance and needs to include worker representation so that worker voices on what they truly need are at the table.”

The collapse of an eight-storey factory building known as Rana Plaza was initially reported to have killed more than a hundred workers. As the week progressed and a major fire broke out, that figure quadrupled, setting off a public relations storm as human rights companies scrambled to identify the companies that sourced from the factory.

U.S.-based companies The Children’s Place and Cato Fashion have both been tracked as sourcing from the factory, but companies such as JCPenney, which sells European brands manufactured at the factory, are also under pressure from activist groups.

“Deadly psychology”

As critics strengthened calls for substantive changes in business practices to prevent another Dhaka tragedy, multinational companies responded this week with a flurry of press releases and attempts at deflecting blame.

“We did not have any ongoing production at the time of the incident,” Cato said in a statement.

The Children’s Place issued a similar statement, saying “none of our apparel was in production” there at the time of the collapse.

Activist groups also point to companies’ reluctance to sign onto a binding agreement known as the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement as a lack of commitment to worker safety.

“The clothing brands’ insatiable hunger for lower prices and faster delivery by factories cultivates this deadly psychology in Bangladesh,” the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), an independent monitoring group, said in a statement.

According to the WRC, the agreement would obligate participating companies to “open the doors of their Bangladesh factories to independent inspection and … pay for a country-wide program of renovations and repairs to make these buildings safe.”

The agreement, negotiations over which began in December 2010, needs four companies to become binding; so far, it has only attracted two.

One of the most notable instances of a prominent company bowing out of the negotiations was GAP, Inc., which owns GAP, Old Navy, and Banana Republic, among others. The company chose instead to create their own programme in October 2012.

Yet critics say that GAP’s alternative plan is inadequate. The plan carries no provisions about paying more to factories so they can abide by safety standards, for instance, and does not involve workers or unions in oversight and implementation.

Most importantly, the plan is voluntary and has no teeth for enforcing the measures. IPS contacted GAP for comment but did not receive a response.

Walmart, one of the largest retailers in the United States, denied a connection to Rana Plaza to IPS, but had been listed on the factory website, raising questions from activists. It has taken a similar route to that of GAP.

In an e-mail from the company’s international corporate affairs office, IPS was referred to a description of the store’s 1.6-million-dollar donation after the Tazreen fire in 2012 to establish the Environment, Health and Safety Academy in Bangladesh. The Academy would give “comprehensive training” on workplace safety to apparel workers.

Walmart also pointed IPS to a press release about the company’s “strengthening” of fire safety regulations in January 2012 in its factories.

Those regulations include “conducting regular fire drills, ensuring adequate number of exit routes and mandating fire safety training to all levels of factory management”, which critics say underscore a weak and inadequate commitment.

All a game

Missing from both GAP’s and Walmart’s plans is any mention of higher pay to suppliers to pay for safer buildings, which some critics say would be the first line of response if the companies were genuinely committed to the safety of their workers.

This is all just part of a “game” these companies play, Scott Nova, executive director of the Workers Rights Consortium, told IPS.

“These companies recognise they have to claim they’re doing something in order to avoid damage to the image of the brand, but they don’t want to have to do anything,” he said.

“So what we see are token donations and empty promises that can’t be enforced. They weather the public relations crisis and expect [the media spotlight] to fade.”