Zara is under major fire this week after workers in Turkey made a frantic attempt to publicize their working conditions. According to USA Today, shoppers who purchased items from the fashion retailer were surprised to find desperate notes from factory workers sewn into their new garments.
The tags said, “I made this item you are going to buy, but I didn’t get paid for it.”
The tags go on to say that the workers are employed by manufacturer Bravo, and that the manufacturer owes them three months of unpaid wages and severance allowance.
According to Fortune, the Turkish workers are seeking a cut of less than 0.01 percent of Zara’s net sales.
Inditex, the parent company of Zara said that the Bravo factory closed in July 2016 due to the “fraudulent disappearance of the Bravo factory’s owner,” who took all the money Inditex had paid to the factory workers. Not receiving those wages is what prompted the factory workers to take things into their own hands.
In response to this controversy, Inditex released the following statement:
Inditex has met all of its contractual obligations to Bravo Tekstil and is currently working on a proposal with the local IndustriALL affiliate, Mango and Next, to establish a hardship fund for the workers affected by the fraudulent disappearance of the Bravo factory’s owner. This hardship fund would cover unpaid wages, notice indemnity, unused vacation and severance payments of workers that were employed at the time of the sudden shutdown of their factory in July 2016. We are committed to finding a swift solution for all of those impacted.
Hopefully, Inditex sticks to its word and enacts this hardship fund, but it looks pretty bad for the company that factory workers had to go as far as getting the consumers involved for this matter to be taken care of.
