Factory: Gladpeer Garments Factory Ltd.
Key Buyers: H&M, Next
Last Updated: 2021
Case Summary
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.
Gladpeer Garments 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 April 2020, Gladpeer Garments dismissed 2,000 workers when it closed. As of April 2021, these workers were still waiting for $1,368,000 in legally owed compensation.
Gladpeer Garments Factory Ltd., a sewing facility, located at NR 4, Phum Prey Pring, Chaom Chau 1 Commune, Pur SenChey District, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia, was a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based Gladpeer Development Ltd., which lists Abercrombie & Fitch, H&M, Mango, and Puma on its website as clients, among others. Gladpeer Development Ltd. owns another factory in Cambodia (Anful Garments Factory Ltd.) and two in China (in Dongguang and Guangxi). Next’s July 2020 supplier list and H&M’s March 2020 supplier list included Gladpeer Garments Factory (Cambodia) Ltd. Next told the WRC in December 2020 that its final shipment from the factory was in March H&M told the WRC in January 2021 that the factory is not currently among its suppliers but did not indicate whether Gladpeeer Garments was previously a supplier. Import records, however, show a June 2019 shipment by Gladpeer Garments Factory (Cambodia) Ltd. of H&M clothing to the US.
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