Factory: Vega Textile Ltd.
Key Buyers: Gap, PVH, Under Armour
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.
Vega Textile 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 March 2020, Vega Textile dismissed 300 workers. As of April 2021, these workers were still waiting for $180,000 in legally owed compensation.
Vega Textile Ltd., a supplier to Gap Inc., PVH, and Under Armour, located at Al-Hussein Bin, Abdullah II Industrial Estate, Al-Karak, Jordan, is owned by a Taiwanese company, UIC/United Fashion/Skytrend. The firm owns at least one other factory in Jordan and two in Cambodia and employs sizable numbers of Cambodian, Burmese, and Sri Lankan migrant workers. The Jordanian Ministry of Labor ordered Vega Textile to pay compensation equal to three months’ wages to 300 migrant workers who were stranded in Jordan after their employment contracts expired during the government-imposed lockdown, but the factory failed to comply with this order. Gap and PVH have acknowledged to the WRC that Vega Textile was a supplier. Under Armour listed Vega Textile in its December 2019 supplier list.
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