Report on Foreign Workers in One of Jordan's Export Production Factories

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Jun 12, 2011 Jordan
[Classic Fashion PR. Image from IGLHR report on Jordan.] [Classic Fashion PR. Image from IGLHR report on Jordan.]

Report on Foreign Workers in One of Jordan's Export Production Factories

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[Below is the latest from the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights on Jordan.]

Sexual Predators and Serial Rapists Run Wild at Wal-Mart Supplier in Jordan: Young women workers raped, tortured and beaten at the Classic Factory

Executive Summary

  • According to witnesses who work at Classic Fashion, scores of young Sri Lankan women sewing clothing for Wal-Mart and Hanes have suffered routine sexual abuse and repeated rapes, and in some cases even torture. One young rape victim at the Classic factory in Jordan told us her assailant, a manager, bit her, leaving scars all over her body. Women who become pregnant are forcibly deported and returned to Sri Lanka. Women who refuse the sexual advances of Classic‘s managers are also beaten and deported.
  • Classic, the largest garment export factory in Jordan, sews clothing for Wal-Mart, Hanes, Kohl‘s, Target and Macy‘s. The garments enter the U.S. duty-free under the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement.
  • On the weekly holiday, the alleged serial rapist general manager, Anil Santha, sends a van to bring four or five young women to his hotel, where he abuses them. The lives of the young Sri Lankan rape victims are completely shattered, as in their culture, virginity is highly prized and critical for a good marriage.
  • In October 2010, 2,400 Sri Lankan and Indian workers went on strike demanding the removal of the alleged rapist, Anil. Classic‘s owner, Sanal Kumar, sent Anil away, but he returned after one month.
  • Through the Institute/National Labor Committee‘s reports, the Ministry of Labor has been made aware of the sexual abuse as early as 2007, but has done nothing.
  • The standard shift at Classic is 13 hours a day, six and seven days a week, with some 18 ½ hour shifts before the clothing must be shipped to the U.S. According to witness testimonies, workers are routinely cursed at, hit and shortchanged of their wages for failing to reach their mandatory production goals. To press the women to work faster, managers grope and fondle them.
  • The workers—who are from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Egypt, earn a take-home wage of just 61 cents an hour.
  • The workers are housed in primitive dorms lacking heat or hot water, but which are infested with bed bugs. The women have extremely limited freedom of movement and are allowed to leave the factory
    compound just one day a week for six hours. When they are forced to work through their weekly holiday, they may be allowed out just once or twice a month.
  • The minimal efforts of Wal-Mart, Hanes and the other labels to monitor factory conditions at Classic have failed completely. Workers are threatened by management and forced to say that conditions are good.
  • We are strongly urging representatives of the labels to join us in Jordan on Friday, June 17 for a large meeting with the Classic workers.
  • It is our intention, along with the United Steelworkers and our women‘s rights colleagues in Sri Lanka, to rescue the women who have been victimized and return them safely home to their families. We expect Wal-Mart, Hanes and the other labels to pay significant compensation to the rape victims to restore some dignity to their lives. This is the least they can do.
  • The U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement has also failed over the last ten years to protect the basic rights of the 30,000 foreign guest workers sewing garments for export to the U.S.
  • One Bangladeshi worker recently deported from the Classic factory told us today that, ―all the workers of Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh…everybody will testify that Anil raped the Sri Lankan women. Everybody knows. In a safe place, the workers will testify.

. . .

Classic Fashion Apparel

Classic Fashion Apparel Industry, Ltd. Co.

Mr. K. S. Sanal Kumar (India)
Owner, Chairman and Managing Director

Al-Hassan Industrial Estate
Ramtha, Irbid
Jordan

Phone:  +96.2273.91369

Fax:  +96.2273.91368

Cell:  +96.2775.757057
Email: sanal@cfa.team.com


There are five separate Classic factories in the Al Hassan Industrial Estate: Classic I, Classic II, Classic III, and Classic IV and V, which are housed in the same building.

Labels produced at the Classic Group of Factories are: Danskin Now (Wal-Mart), Champion (Hanes for Target), Style & Co (Macy‘s), and Sonoma (Kohl‘s). An order for the large food service company, Sodexo, had just been completed at Classic. Wal-Mart accounts for the largest proportion of production at Classic.

Classic opened its first garment factory in Jordan in 2003, with a workforce of just 300 guest workers and $2 million in sales for the year. Over the next seven years, Classic grew at an almost impossible pace. By the end of 2010, Classic‘s workforce had surged to over 4,800—a sixteen- fold increase from the 300 workers in 2003 and the vast majority of them poor women guest workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and India. During the same period, from 2003 to 2010, Classic‘s sales grew by 60 fold, from $2 million in 2003 to $120 million at the end of 2010. Running a sweatshop under the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement, employing young women guest workers who are stripped of their rights, is evidently very profitable.

Today, Classic Fashion is the largest garment exporter in Jordan, producing over 100,000 garments a day and accounting for over 15 percent of total exports even in 2009. Eighty-five percent of Classic‘s employees are guest workers.

Classic Fashion has five factories in the Al-Hassan Industrial Estate along with two other plants, Jerash in the Al-Tajamouat Industrial Estate and the Casual Wear factory in the Ad Dulayl Industrial Park.

Classic Fashion is Indian-owned. There is a Classic Fashion Apparel factory located in the Chennai area of India, and Classic has another factory, Mechanical Ing at Classic Fashion Apparel in Egypt.

By any serious and objective account, the Classic Group of factories in Jordan would surely be categorized as illegal sweatshops. Yet, what seems incomprehensible, the Jordanian Ministry of Labor has awarded the Classic Group of factories "Golden List" status for the last 4 ¾ years! Being on the "Golden List" means these factories are in full compliance with all local Jordanian laws as well as with the labor rights provisions in the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement. Supposedly, only factories "complying with international/local social and ethical compliance requirements" can achieve "Golden List" status.

A monitoring group called "Better Work Jordan," which is almost exclusively funded by the U.S. Government, has also been inspecting the Classic Group of factories for the last two years. Moreover:

"Better Work Jordan certifies Classic Fashion for producing garments to major retailers and brands like Wal-Mart, Kohl‟s, Hanesbrands, Jones Apparel, Sears, Lands End, to name a few."- Social Accountability and Sustainability, Awards and recognitions, Classic Fashion website.


The sad reality at the Classic Group of factories is one of serial rapists and sexual predators running wild, abusing and torturing scores of young women guest workers, especially those from Sri Lanka. Workers are routinely beaten and forced to work overtime while being shortchanged of their legal wages. The dorms lack heat and hot water, but have an abundance of bed bugs. Freedom of movement is strictly curtailed for women workers. Any worker asking for her basic rights will be forcibly deported on false charges. The 4,800 foreign guest workers at the Classic Group of factories in Jordan are trapped in a hell hole with no exit and nowhere to turn for help.

Under the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement, Jordan‘s garment exports to the U.S. increased by 34.4 percent in 2010, reaching $1.06 billion, compared to $748 million in 2009.

There are over 30,000 poor, mostly young women, foreign guest workers toiling in Jordan‘s largely foreign-owned garment factories sewing clothing for export to the United States. Under the Free Trade Agreement, those garments enter the U.S. duty-free.

The guest workers are from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, China, Nepal and Egypt. They earn less than three-quarters the wage of Jordanian garment workers, who account for only 15 to 25 percent of the total garment workforce. Jordanians earn $1.02 an hour while the foreign guest workers take home 74½ cents an hour. The Jordanians work eight hours a day, while the guest workers toil an average of 12 hours a day.

 

[Click here to read the full report.]
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412