Word: wrc
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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...
...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...
Blacklisting violates Salvadoran and international law. It also violates the codes of conduct for apparel production of universities like Harvard. Those codes require that factories not discriminate in employment and that management respect the right to unionize and bargain collectively. Collegiate code compliance is typically monitored by the WRC or the Fair Labor Association (FLA), the 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...
When reached for comment on Friday, Lands’ End representatives declined to address the specific allegations of the WRC...
...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...