Garment industry reliance on social auditors should end, law firm says
A UK-based lawyer who is representing 130 garment workers from Asia in what could become a landmark court case has said social auditing in the clothing industry “is seriously broken”.
Legal firm Leigh Day sent a letter before action, the first step in legal proceedings, to UK-based retail group Tesco and to specialist auditing service provider Intertek in December. The law firm is representing garment workers from Myanmar who found work in a factory in Thailand that made garments for Tesco clothing brand F+F.
This factory was owned by a third-party supplier, VKG, and was subject to regular audits by a Thailand-based Intertek team.
Allegations in the letter before action include complaints that, while working at VKG between 2017 and 2020, the migrant workers were paid, at most, £4 a day, had to work 99 hours a week, and became “trapped in a cycle of forced labour and debt bondage”.
Detailed reports appeared in The Guardian newspaper, whose reporters travelled to Thailand to ask garment workers about their experience of making F+F clothes. One woman said she had to leave two small children on their own in a dormitory at the site while she worked in the factory. Returning to them after ten o’clock one night, she found that her seven-year-old daughter had suffered a very serious assault at the hands of another VKG employee. She and her daughter are among the 130 complainants in the case.
Tesco and Intertek have expressed regret about the treatment the workers are alleged to have received but have said they believe they have no case to answer in UK courts.
Mr Holland said: “The social auditing industry is seriously broken and the garment industry’s reliance on social auditors like Intertek should end now and they should start to take greater responsibility for their supply chains to ensure endemic issues like forced labour are wiped out.”
Image: Leigh Day.
