Uh, it’s not a come on…seriously. If it’s a casual day, and you are just lounging around your house or walking the streets, just curious if your clothes carry a Gap or Old Navy label. Yeah, you know what’s coming — blood, sweat and tears put that on your back.

The tiny, hardy and committed band at the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights has a crackling report on what people are being asked to do in Bangladesh for the likes of Gap and Old Navy:

• The 3,750-worker Next Collections factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh on the outskirts of Dhaka is part of the Ha-Meem Group, Bangladesh’s second largest garment exporter which owns 26 factories and employs over 30,000 workers.

• At the Next Collections sweatshop, approximately 70 percent of production is for Gap and Old Navy.  Gap is the largest specialty apparel chain in the U.S.

• Next Collections workers are forced to toil 14- to 17-plus-hour shifts, seven days a week, routinely putting in workweeks of over 100 hours.  Workers are visibly sick and exhausted from the grueling and excessive hours.

• Workers live in poverty, earning just 20 to 24 cents per hour.

• Physical punishment and illegal firings are the norm.

• Pregnant women are illegally terminated and denied their legal paid maternity leave.

• For the last two-and-a-half years, Gap has been complicit with Next Collections/Ha-Meem Group in a scam to defraud the workers of their legal wages and benefits.

─ Management hands out phony pay slips to pretend that Gap is in compliance with legal hours and wages.
─ Workers are paid in cash, off the books and cheated of 15 percent of their grueling overtime hours.  At Next Collections alone, workers are being robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and millions if one includes all the factories of the Ha-Meem Group.

• Workers live in miserable poverty in tiny primitive hovels.  By the third week in a month, most have no money left for food.

• Bangladesh garment workers continue to be the hardest workers in the world and are also among the poorest.

You can also read this news article about the report.

The important thing this report points is something I’ve harped on ever since the horrific collapse at the Rana Plaza: the brutal, inhumane treatment of people in factories around the world will NEVER cease if you rely on “Self-monitoring” or phony “independent” oversight. The only way people get treated fairly is when there is a union in place — the voice of workers, the guardian of workers. Until that happens, the rest is a dangerous fig-leaf.