HanesBrands Pays Garment Workers $330,000 in Severance
Labor rights monitoring organization Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) reports HanesBrands paid 800-plus workers a total of $330,000 in severance following the closing of GO Haiti, a garment factory where HanesBrands served as its main buyer. The checks, received in August 2022, equaled nearly three months of pay per worker.
“HanesBrands paying these funds is notable not just because of the desperate situation facing garment workers in Haiti, but because, as the WRC has documented extensively, around the world garment workers are regularly robbed of their severance. This included an estimated $500 billion to $850 billion owed to garment workers globally within the first year of the pandemic due to factory closures,” states the WRC.
The intervention of Hanes shows its commitment to preventing severance violations within its supply chain, as well as the positive impact of nearly 20 years of WRC engagement, says the company.
The WRC says garment factories typically operate on small margins and often don’t set aside future severance for workers. So, if layoffs or closures happen at a time when an employer doesn’t have the money, many workers get denied that pay.
When GO Haiti’s key clients ended their sourcing relationships, the factory closed its doors. HanesBrands knew cutting ties could lead to the plant’s closure, and requested information from the factory owner on how much severance was owed to each worker. Hanes supplied the funds to avoid the owner from defaulting.
On Aug. 31, HanesBrands reported that 827 of the 835 workers collected their severance checks, according to the WRC. This isn’t the first time the organization has worked with HanesBrands to ensure severance pay to workers in its supply chain. Most recently, Hanes provided $400,000 to correct severance theft from workers in Indonesia in 2020.
“HanesBrands’ commitment to ensuring workers at GO Haiti received their legally due severance payments is to the brand’s credit, but, unfortunately, its proactive stance remains an exception rather than the rule in the global apparel industry. Today, factories that supplied major brands still owe hundreds of millions of dollars in severance to workers who lost their jobs at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when buyers canceled orders en masse,” states the WRC.
