Workers outside the Jerzees Nuevo Día factory in Honduras call on
Fruit of the Loom to keep unionized factories open (CGT).
Twenty-seven labour and other civil society organizations, including MSN, have sent a joint letter to the US apparel brand Fruit of the Loom, urging the company to reverse its decision to close two unionized factories in Honduras.
The company recently announced that it will be closing the Jerzees Nuevo Día and Confecciones Dos Caminos garment factories. The two factories have been a beacon of progress in respect for worker rights for Honduras’ entire garment manufacturing industry. If carried out, the closure of the factories will have a devastating impact on more than 3,000 employees and their families and reverses historic gains achieved over the last decade for the rights of garment workers across Honduras.
In 2008, Fruit of the Loom, at that time Honduras’ largest private sector employer, responded to its Honduran workers seeking to improve their labour conditions, by closing a recently unionized factory, its only organized facility in the country at that time.
An investigation by the independent factory monitoring organization, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), found overwhelming evidence that Fruit of the Loom closed the factory in retaliation for workers exercising their right to freedom of association by forming a union. At the urging of students and labour rights organizations, including MSN, nearly 100 US, Canadian, and UK universities and colleges that had licensed Fruit of the Loom to produce collegiate apparel bearing their names and logos, under its Russell Athletic label, announced they were cutting ties with the company over these violations of its workers’ rights.
In November 2009, Fruit of the Loom made an historic decision to end this repressive approach to labour relations by opening a new factory in the same town as the shuttered facility and hiring workers from it. This new facility was named Jerzees Nuevo Día – “a New Day at Jerzees” – in recognition of the company’s reversal of its anti-union approach at the factory it had just closed.
In an historic agreement with workers and their union, Fruit of the Loom not only agreed to open the new factory, which started operations in 2010, and provide employment to the union members it had fired but also committed to respect workers’ rights to unionize at all the facilities it owned in Honduras.
Over the following fourteen years, workers successfully established unions at nearly all the company’s other factories in Honduras, including at the Confecciones Dos Caminos plant, where they negotiated collective bargaining agreements to improve working conditions.
This historic commitment to respect freedom of association and comply with labour rights standards created a precedent for other North American-owned factories in Honduras. Workers were successful in establishing independent unions and improving labour conditions at dozens of Honduran garment factories, including plants owned by major brands like Hanes and Gildan Activewear. Until the recent wave of factory closures, Honduras had possibly the highest union density of any garment export manufacturing sector in the world.
A 2022 report by Dr. Mark Anner from the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Pennsylvania State University documented economic benefits Honduran garment workers won through their unions, including new transportation and food subsidies, personal savings, and protections from sexual harassment and verbal abuse. The report showed that these improvements in their wages and working conditions meant that workers were less likely to migrate from Honduras to the United States.
In a pattern seen previously in the garment industries of other countries, after their Honduran workers began to win basic rights and improve their working conditions, Fruit of the Loom and other North American factory owners began closing the plants they operated in the country. Of the six garment factories it operated in Honduras in 2010, Fruit of the Loom in Honduras has already closed or announced the impending closure of five. Fruit of the Loom’s sole garment factory in Honduras that is not slated for closure is nonunion, though the company continues to have a small unionized distribution centre in the country.
According to Mark Anner, who is currently Dean at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University, Fruit of the Loom received universal praise from labour and human rights organizations for its commitment to respecting its workers’ right to organize unions and to bargain collectively for improvements in their wages and working conditions. “If the company wants to continue to be recognized as an ethical company, it must reverse its decision to close its unionized factories in Honduras,” says Anner.
Given the significance of its unionized Honduran factories for prospects for better lives and greater dignity for garment workers not only in Honduras, but around the world, Fruit of the Loom’s decision to close these unionized garment facilities represents a major reversal of its previous commitment to respect workers’ rights.
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