Minikin Togs Ltd.

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.

Minikin 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 July 2020, Minikin dismissed 1,500 workers when it closed. As of April 2021, these workers were still waiting for $1,029,879 in legally owed compensation.

Minikin Togs Ltd., located at Ppal 1, Zona Industrial, Santiago, Dominican Republic, was owned by a Pennsylvania company of the same name. Minikin Togs Ltd. is a subsidiary of Fishman & Tobin, which was acquired by Li & Fung in 2011. Import records indicate the factory supplied Edwards Garment in July 2020 and Centric Brands, a licensee of PVH, in June 2020. According to worker reports, they sewed clothing under several different PVH brands: Calvin Klein, Izod, and Tommy Hilfiger.

Read More:

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