Ahead of Black Friday, Report Reveals Attacks on Garment Workers' Right to Organize

With clothing companies that will be offering discounted Black Friday deals this week relying heavily on the labor of tens of millions underpaid and overworked garment workers across the Global South, two reports by the human rights group Amnesty International make the case that ensuring these employees are afforded the right to organize their workplaces is key to ending worker exploitation across the fashion industry.

The organization interviewed 64 garment workers in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan from 2023-24, including 12 union organizers and labor rights activists, for its report titled Stitched Up, about the denial of freedom of association for workers in the four countries.

Two-thirds of the workers Amnesty interviewed were women, reflecting the fact that the garment workforce is mainly female, and many described the long hours, poverty wages, and abusive working conditions that the industry is known for.

But beyond that, the workers told Amnesty about the "climate of fear" they work in, with all but two of the 13 workers in Bangladesh reporting they had faced threats of retaliation at work if they joined or tried to form a union.

More than two dozen union organizers in the four countries described harassment, dismissal, and threats that they and their colleagues had faced for organizing their workplace.

“When workers raise their voices, they are ignored. When they try to organize, they are threatened and sacked. And finally, when workers protest, they are beaten, shot at, and arrested,” said a labor rights activist identified as Taufiq in Bangladesh.

The report notes that "restrictions on the right of workers to organize into trade unions and collectively speak out against human rights abuses at work are a violation of the fundamental right to freedom of association and collective bargaining," which are affirmed by the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, said that "an unholy alliance of fashion brands, factory owners, and the governments of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka is propping up an industry known for its endemic human rights abuses" and allowing mistreatment of workers to continue while barring employees from working together to fight for better conditions and pay.

"By failing to ensure that the right of garment workers to unionize and collectively bargain is respected, the industry has thrived for decades on the exploitation of a grossly underpaid, overworked, and mostly female workforce,” said Callamard.

The governments of the four countries have failed to provide a living wage to garment workers—instead competing to attract the investment of clothing companies by setting the lowest wages possible. Almost all of the workers interviewed by Amnesty said their wages did not cover their families' living costs.

Many of the workers also reported that they were hired with "informal" work contracts, with no formal mechanisms for reporting workplace abuses, including violence and sexual harassment.

“I was touched physically and abused verbally. No one in management would listen to my complaints then I asked other women to organize. I was threatened with dismissal many times,” Sumaayaa, a worker and organizer from Lahore, Pakistan, told Amnesty.

The governments in question have done nothing to counter such precarious working arrangements, with officials establishing "Special Economic Zones" (SEZ) in Bangladesh and "Free Trade Zones" in Sri Lanka—areas where administrative measures place "often insurmountable barriers against union communication and access to workers."

Instead of affording workers the right to freedom of association in SEZ's, officials in Bangladesh encourage workers to form "welfare associations or committees, which have limited ability to collectively organize."

Alongside Stitched Up, Amnesty released the companion report Abandoned by Fashion: The Urgent Need for Fashion Brands to Champion Workers’ Rights, which details top brands' responses to an international survey on the rights of garment workers to organize their workplaces.

All of the fashion brands and retailers surveyed, including Adidas, ASOS, Shein, PVH, and Marks and Spencer, had "codes of conduct for suppliers, human rights policies, or principles, which affirmed the company’s commitment to workers’ right to freedom of association."

But the survey revealed "a limited commitment to implementing these policies at the factory level, especially in proactively promoting union organizing and ensuring human rights commitments and the ability of workers to exercise this right were reflected in their choice of sourcing location."

Amnesty found very few independent trade unions operating within the companies' supply chains in the four countries.

Adidas reported that 9.5% of its suppliers in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan have unions. H&M works with 145 factories in Bangladesh, 29 of which had trade unions. Of 31 factories in Bangladesh, none had unions, and eight out of 93 facilities in India had them.

In the case of the clothing company Next, just 23 of the 167 apparel factories the company works with in Bangladesh had independent unions, while 134 had less empowered "committees."

"These findings provide a very stark indication of the low levels of unionization within the supply chains of major fashion companies in South Asia," reads the report. "They reveal the impact of the failures of the governments of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to protect and promote garment workers’ rights in relation to the right to freedom of association. Our research shows how all four states have effectively denied this right to garment workers, including by creating disproportionate or arbitrary barriers to registration, unionization, and strike action, and by failing in their responsibility to protect workers, union members, and officials from corporate abuse including discrimination, harassment, and dismissal."

Amnesty International made a number of recommendations to fashion companies, including:

• Building an ethical sourcing strategy that rewards genuine freedom of association, penalizes its denial, and prohibits retaliation against unions—at the supplier level but also when taking sourcing decisions across the whole supply chain;
• Working with independent local trade unions to concretely strengthen worker organizing through, for example, making public commitments locally alongside practical support and engagement with suppliers;
• Ensuring that policies, paper commitments, and codes of conduct on freedom of association and collective bargaining are practically implemented, with time-bound progress monitored and made public, providing examples of good practice; and
• Publicly supporting worker movements and trade unions, in the supply chain but also those directly employed, in their struggles around wages, working conditions, and the fight against union busting.

“The need of the hour is to build a human rights-respecting sourcing strategy for the global garment industry," she said. "Freedom of association is key to tackling the abuse of workers’ rights. It must be protected, advanced, and championed.”