Factory: PT Gunung Salak Sukabumi
Key Buyers: Gap, Target
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.
PT Gunung Salak Sukabumi 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, PT Gunung Salak Sukabumi dismissed 300 workers. As of April 2021, these workers were still waiting for $237,000 in legally owed compensation.
PT Gunung Salak Sukabumi, a sewing facility located at Kp Pasir Dalem, Desa Babakan Pari, Kecamatan Cidahu, Kabupaten Sukabumi, Jawa Barat, Indonesia, is owned by Seoul-based Nobland International, which has a garment facility subsidiary in South Korea and lists JCPenney, Gap, Old Navy, and Target among its customers. Target listed PT Gunung Salak Sukabumi in its February 2021 supplier list and Gap Inc. listed the factory in its March 2020 disclosure. Gap Inc. claimed in a January 2021 letter to the WRC that 45 workers resigned (and that the majority of them did so due to their contracts ending or voluntary departure) and that it reviewed records showing those workers were paid according to local law. Information provided by workers demonstrates, however, that 300 workers were terminated and that these workers had been employed illegally on multiple short-term contracts and therefore, per applicable law, are owed the same severance entitlements as if they had been properly classified as regular employees.
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