LABOR
FINDING A VOICE
Nien Hsing Textile Co. was a tipping point in the denim industry's history of violence against women. w o r ds _____JASMIN MALIK CHUA
Msebabolo Chosti was into her second year making jeans at one of Lesotho’s largest denim manufacturers when she was raped by a supervisor. Chosti, who was 29 in 2017, recalls the events of the day vividly. It was Sunday and she and her Global International co-workers had just participated in a concert outside the capital city of Maseru, where they lived and worked. Her supervisor, part of a group of men responsible for getting the women home safely, was assigned to her. “When we got off the bus, he asked me if he could go and wear something warm at his house first,” Chosti said. “When we got there, he said I am not leaving without having sex with him. When I refused, he turned up the radio and raped me.” Complaining to the shop steward didn’t help, she said, and her supervisor mocked her for “complaining for nothing” because nobody believed her. Transferring to other departments didn’t improve the situation, either. “You can’t wrong one supervisor and get away with it; [it’s like] they [have] a pact,” Chosti said. She left Global International in anger and frustration. Denim’s connection with violence against women runs deep. In 1992, the Italian Supreme Court sparked fury after it suggested that a woman cannot be raped if she is wearing tight jeans because they are “impossible to pull off” without her assistance and therefore consent. Since 1999, the last Wednesday of April has been recognized as “Denim Day,” with supporters donning jeans as a visible symbol of protest against misconceptions around sexual assault, including the so-called “denim defense.” Two decades later, just before Chosti resigned, the Worker Rights Consortium released a bombshell report, based on interviews with 140 workers, that described a systemic pattern of gender-based violence and harassment at factories operated by Nien Hsing Textile Co.— Global International included. The allegations couldn’t be brushed off or buried as so many
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before them had before. The #MeToo movement had unleashed an unprecedented reckoning about sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace, and the Taiwanese-owned manufacturer supplied jeans to some of the world’s biggest brands, including Levi Strauss, The Children’s Place and Lee and Wrangler owner Kontoor Brands. Women like Chosti, the WRC found, were regularly pressured by their managers for sex to secure jobs or gain promotions. Being groped and catcalled by male co-workers was also “common practice,” the report said. Despite an “abusive behavior hotline and mailbox” that workers could use to report misconduct or coercion, workers said that their complaints frequently led nowhere. For the most part, the women stayed quiet because they feared retaliation or they distrusted management to act. Others did not even identify what they were experiencing as sexual abuse, while those who didn’t comply with demands were swiftly ejected. Botlenyane Riba had just started working in Global International’s packing department in 2017 when her supervisor wrote her a note that said, “I miss you.” The then-22-year-old thought he was joking, but the messages persisted. “When I was not responsive, he harassed me at work, shouting at me and sometimes ignoring work-related requests,” Riba said. Things quickly escalated. Riba’s supervisor accused her of refusing to follow instructions, which he said that “according to company policy was against the law.” Soon, Riba received her marching orders for “insubordination.” Nien Hsing, she added, didn’t listen to her side of the story. After that, she was unemployed for an entire year. Part of a continuum of abuse, genderbased violence and harassment isn’t new to the fashion supply chain, nor is it unique to Lesotho. According to a 2017 report by Care, one in three female garment workers in Cambodia said they experienced sexually harassing behaviors in the
workplace over the past year. A 2019 report by ActionAid estimates that 80 percent of garment workers in Bangladesh have faced or witnessed sexual violence and harassment in their factories. The phenomenon, which is employed as a means of control, punishment or exploitation, is so ubiquitous it gets its own acronym, GBVH, short for gender-based violence and harassment. Because sexual abuse occurs most frequently in sectors where the power differential between employers and employees is the greatest, where men hold the majority of oversight over women, and where wages are low and employment is precarious, garment workers are especially susceptible, said Rola Abimourched, deputy director of investigations and gender equity at the WRC. Often, GBVH thrives where workers are unable to exercise their rights to freedom of association and where factory management actively cracks down on these rights, she said. Nien Hsing, which employed 10,000 workers across multiple factories at the time of the investigation, the majority of them women, stood out not only because of its size but also the frequency of the complaints. The WRC’s original research brief, in fact, only had to do with general labor-rights violations, not sexual abuse specifically. But the workers the organization interviewed kept bringing up the subject, which prompted a change in focus. “In all of these factories, this was the norm and not the exception,” Abimourched said. When the WRC raised the issue with Levi’s, Kontoor and The Children’s Place, the companies initially balked. Their factory audits and inspections hadn’t picked up any issues and their relationship with Nien Hsing was a long-term and fruitful one. Nien Hsing’s initial reaction, too, was to deny any of the allegations. But the severity of the issue and the potential reputational fallout proved too great to ignore, Abimourched said, and it was subsequently determined that the old ways—a top-down,