Garden City Fashions

The apparel industry’s chronically low wages left most garment workers with no savings on the eve of the Covid-19 crisis. Since most governments in apparel exporting countries provide little or no unemployment benefits, the only thing standing between an out-of-work garment worker and immediate poverty for her family are the legally mandated severance benefits that most garment workers are due upon termination.

Research by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) reveals that many garment workers who were fired during the pandemic have been denied some or all of this essential compensation, in violation of the law and the labor rights obligations of the brands and retailers whose clothes they sewed.

Garden City Fashions is one of the 31 export garment factories identified in the WRC’s report, Fired, Then Robbed: Fashion brands’ complicity in wage theft during Covid-19, which still owed workers legally mandated terminal compensation as of April 2021. In May 2020, Garden City Fashions dismissed 4,500 workers when it closed. As of April 2021, these workers were still waiting for $778,803 in legally owed compensation.

Garden City Fashions, a sewing facility, was located at #84, Industrial Suburb, Yeshwanthpur, Bangalore, India. The Garment and Textile Workers Union (GATWU) informed the WRC that workers reported sewing for C&A and JCPenney. C&A’s April 2020 disclosure included Garden City Fashions Units II, III, IV, and V. Import records show shipments for Guess through April 2020. On its website, Garden City Fashions states that its key partners are C&A, Guess, Debenhams, Cecil, Next, Forever 21, Esprit, Mufti, and Dunnes Stores.

Read More:

• Fired, Then Robbed: Fashion brands’ complicity in wage theft during Covid-19 – April 2021