Lesotho is a growing player in the global textile and apparel industry, producing 26m pairs of jeans annually and employing about 38,000 people. Roughly 85% of all exports go to the US, where buyers include Gap, Reebok, Ralph Lauren, Walmart and Calvin Klein Jeanswear, according to official figures.
At clothing factories in Lesotho, women producing jeans for American brands including Levi Strauss, Wrangler and Lee have been forced to sleep with their managers to keep their jobs or gain promotion, an investigation into sexual harassment and coercion by the US-based Worker Rights Consortium.
A two-year investigation by WRC into Taiwanese company Nien Hsing operations, found that managers and supervisors regularly coerced female workers into sexual relationships by promising promotions or full-time contracts. Sexual harassment from managers and supervisors was so pervasive that male co-workers also routinely engaged in abusive behaviour, according to off-site interviews with 140 workers in various operations at three Nien Hsing factories, where women engaged in sewing, quality control, cutting, washing and packing.
“All of the women in my department have slept with the supervisor,” one worker told the labour rights group. “For the women, this is about survival and nothing else…If you say no, you won’t get the job, or your contract won’t get renewed.”
Another claimed no action was taken against her supervisor despite a complaint to personnel about inappropriate touching: “They said they would fix it. No action was taken. Then I just let it go because they didn’t do anything about it.”
The report includes allegations against managers from overseas. One worker claimed that “foreign national managers slap women’s buttocks and touch their breasts”, adding: “One time, we caught [an expatriate] manager having sex with a female worker in the factory. The women in these relationships get promoted easily and get a lot of bonuses.”
The investigation also found that management failed to take disciplinary action against offenders, and that workers’ right to unionise was suppressed preventing them from collectively raising their concerns. Supervisors who were found to have engaged in sexual harassment, bribery or other forms of misconduct were usually transferred between departments, rather than being disciplined.
Notably, the abuses were not detected by the factories’ voluntary codes of conduct or monitoring programmes, as managers put pressure on employees “to lie” to auditors, the report claims.
“We are demanded to lie on behalf of the company,” one worker was quoted as saying.
“The people that buy the product of the company were on site, and we were threatened that if anyone told the truth of what really happens, it might jeopardise their jobs.”
No comments:
Post a Comment