Word: primo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Primo factory in El Salvador, 5.000 workers, mostly young women, produce clothing for Harvard and other American colleges through Lands’ End. Conditions at Primo are, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, appalling. According to the Workers’ Rights Consortium (WRC), a not-for-profit independent sweatshop monitoring organization, workers at Primo face abuse from supervisors, forced and unpaid overtime and inadequate health treatment. Perhaps most egregiously, Primo systematically blacklists workers it suspects to be or have been involved with a union...
...Primo particularly targets former workers from another factory, Tainan, which had been shut down immediately after a union formed there. One worker who was initially hired without Primo knowing that she had worked at Tainan was fired before starting work after a further investigation of her file; management, she told the WRC, admitted that she had been fired because of her membership in the Tainan union. Primo management told similar things to other workers who it refused to hire despite their qualifications...
Such anti-union blacklisting has cost many workers in the San Bartolo Free Trade Zone, where Primo is located, their livelihoods. Those workers describe not being able to afford water or electricity, facing eviction without having the money to pay rent and their children being expelled from school once they couldn’t pay tuition. Many are still unable to find employment and are barely able to survive...
...latter of which Harvard is a member. When a factory is in violation of the code and the monitor investigates, schools and brands can sometimes pressure the factory to improve—a strategy that has been successful in the past. In this case, the conditions at Primo reached the WRC through local organizations in El Salvador; the WRC sent a team to collect evidence and conduct interviews, producing a report that is now publicly available...
...addition to explicitly denying employment on grounds of union membership, the WRC alleges that the Primo factory often refused to hire applicants who had worked at the nearby Tainan factory, known as a hotbed of labor solidarity...