Dirty Clothes

[JBeukema]

Nygard, Dillard's, J.C. Penney, Wal-Mart
Linked to Human Trafficking and Abuse of Young Women
in Jordan Sweatshop

• Nygard, Dillards, J.C. Penney and Wal-Mart clothing is being sewn at the International British Garments factory, where 1,200 guest workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India-75 percent of whom are young women-have been trafficked to Jordan, stripped of their passports and held under conditions of indentured servitude.

• The women are forced to work 16-hour shifts, from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., seven days a week. There are also mandatory all-night 23-hour shifts at least once a week, from 7:00 a.m. straight through to 6:00 a.m. the following morning. The exhausted workers are routinely at the factory over 110 hours a week.

• The workers are cheated of over half the legal wages due them. Instead of earning $85.96 for working 102 ½ hours a week, the workers are paid-at most-just $35.77, or less than 35 cents an hour. The minimum wage in Jordan is 74 ½ cents an hour. The workers are paid just nine cents for each pair of women's pants they sew for Nygard and Dillards.

• When the workers ask for the return of their passports and to be paid correctly, they are slapped and threatened with forcible deportation.

• There are credible allegations of sexual harassment and even the rape of a young Sri Lankan woman. Workers report that at least two of their colleagues were overworked to death.

• The workers are housed in filthy, primitive dorms not fit for human beings. The dorms lack heat, and water is only sporadically available for one or two hours, three of four days a week. The dorms are also so infested with bed bugs that the exhausted workers have trouble sleeping. Shown pictures of the insects, a leading entomologist confirmed that the bed bugs were engorged with blood.

• The United States has a Free Trade Agreement with Jordan, but this has not helped the 1,200 foreign guest workers trapped in the IBG factory, where in broad daylight, every single labor law in Jordan has been blatantly violated for more than a year. In fact, the Jordanian Ministry of Labor has placed the abusive IBG plant on their "Golden List" of best factories!

• It is even more disturbing that the IBG factory in Jordan is owned by the world's largest security service company-G4S-which has not lifted a finger to prevent the gross human, women's and labor rights violations of its own workers.

Dirty Clothes - The National Labor Committee

 

[Conspiracist]

Yah, gotta love free trade!

Our unions fought and beat those that would force conditions like this on citizens in our country. Free trade allows advocates of these conditions to prosper and make a profit selling their wares here in the land of the free.

Thanks politicians.