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

Tens of thousands of garment workers at factories producing for leading fashion brands, who were fired during the Covid-19 pandemic, are being denied terminal compensation, in violation of the law and the labor rights obligations of the brands and retailers whose clothes they sewed. This research report exposes severance pay theft at dozens of factories, all named in the report, where workers were robbed of an average of more than a thousand dollars (US) per person.

The WRC’s data represent a modest fraction of the factory closures in the industry, indicating that the severance theft the report reveals is the tip of the iceberg. The WRC estimates that the millions of garment workers terminated globally during the pandemic have been robbed of more than half a billion dollars in earnings since the pandemic’s outset.