Last Thursday marked the announcement of a set of landmark agreements among leading apparel brands, a coalition of labor unions and women’s rights advocates, and a major apparel supplier to combat gender-based violence and harassment in Lesotho’s garment sector.
These enforceable agreements—with Levi Strauss & Co., The Children’s Place, and Kontoor Brands—link each of the brands’ ongoing business with the supplier, Nien Hsing Textile Co., to the supplier’s acceptance of and cooperation with a worker-led program to eliminate sexual harassment and abuse. The program features an independent complaint investigation body with the power to direct punishment of abusive managers and supervisors, up to and including dismissal.
This program arises from years of worker organizing at Nien Hsing by the Independent Democratic Union of Lesotho (IDUL), United Textile Employees (UNITE), the National Clothing Textile and Allied Workers Union—and from years of women’s rights advocacy by the Federation of Women Lawyers in Lesotho and Women (FIDA) and Law in Southern African Research and Education Trust-Lesotho (WLSA). Read more >>
It is an inspiring story of how workers in an industry long distinguished for extreme exploitation found a way to harness the purchasing power of some of the most powerful brands in the apparel industry to monitor and enforce their own rights — in particular the right to work free of sexual harassment and assault — in the workplace.
You can read more about that story in the New York Times (“Report: Levi’s, Wrangler, Lee Seamstresses Harassed, Abused”) and in the Guardian of London (“Bosses force female workers making jeans for Levis and Wrangler into sex”).
Behind every great story is a backstory…
But the backstory of how apparel factories in Lesotho became the very latest front in the expansion of the WSR model – an all-too-rare success story of collaboration among multiple organizations across borders and across industries to advance workers’ fundamental human rights – is quite interesting in its own right.
