BANGKOK, Thailand — Over a thousand sacked Thai
garment workers who made bras for a factory supplying lingerie giant
Victoria’s Secret have received a landmark $8.3 million settlement, labor rights activists
said Saturday.
اضافة اعلان
Brilliant
Alliance Thai closed down its Samut Prakan factory in March 2021 after going
bankrupt.
But the 1,250
laid-off workers — many of whom had worked at the factory for over a decade —
did not receive severance payouts mandated under Thai law.
The factory also
produced underwear for plus size
American brands Lane Bryant and Torrid, owned
by Sycamore Partners — but only Victoria’s Secret contributed to the settlement
via a loan arrangement with the factory’s owners.
Victoria’s Secret
confirmed in a statement that an agreement had been reached, but it did not
mention the amount involved.
“Over several
months we had been in active communication with the factory owners to
facilitate a resolution,” the company said.
“We regret they
were not ultimately in a position to conclude this matter on their own so to
ensure the workers received their full severance amounts owed, Victoria’s
Secret agreed to advance the severance funds to the factory owners,” it added.
Sycamore Partners
did not respond to a request for comment from AFP.
The agreement is
the largest-ever wage theft settlement at an individual garment factory, the
international workers rights group Solidarity Centre said.
“I think it’s
extremely unprecedented and represents a new model — the scale of severance and
interest paid on it... as well as direct engagement by the brand,” Solidarity
Center Thailand country director David Welsh told AFP.
“It eliminates
the fiction that multinational brands are passive investors,” he said.
“We want more brands
to do the same because sadly this will not be the last of its kind — there will
be many, many more cases.”
For the past
year, sacked workers and Thai union representatives have protested outside
Government House in
Bangkok calling for their pay.
Prasit Prasopsuk,
president of the Confederation of Industrial Labor of Thailand said some
protesting workers had been charged with criminal offences, including violating
public gathering rules during the pandemic.
A Worker Rights
Consortium report from April last year said it had documented similar wage
theft cases at 31 garment factories in nine countries.
Worker Rights
Consortium executive director Scott Nova said those cases were just the “tip of
the iceberg” and that the issue of wage theft in the garment industry had
exploded during the pandemic as clothing orders declined.
He estimated
garment workers worldwide were owed $500 million as a result of factory
closures and unpaid severance.
Some workers at
the Samut Prakan factory had received the equivalent of more than four years’
wages last week, he said.
“It’s like the equivalent
of a worker’s life savings... and it’s simply stolen. What it means to lose
that and get it back is difficult to capture in words,” Nova said.
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