“Our lives have no value at all” – Garment and textile workers denounce human rights violations one year after devastating earthquakes hit Turkey

Massive earthquakes that devastated a wide swath of southeastern Turkey just over a year ago left workers in the region's large textile and clothing industry vulnerable to widespread violations of their rights, according to a new report from the Clean Clothes Campaign.

“I learned whose lives are valuable and whose lives are worthless during the earthquake. “The lives of workers like us have no value at all,” one sector employee told researchers in the January 2024 report, Impact of the Earthquake on Textile and Clothing Workers, which Published by the Clean Clothes Campaign in Turkey and based on 130 anonymous interviews with textile and clothing workers. Garment industry workers.

The findings also point to the failure of well-known global brands to support their global supply chains during disaster and crisis situations, according to the report's author, Derya Guger, a professor at the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Middle East Technical University in Ankara.

“Disasters like this exacerbate the bad practices and inequalities already rooted in the sector, as tight production deadlines mean an even faster manner.” [local] “Employers are under pressure because they may lose the supply contract,” says Goger.

“In a post-disaster context, this means workers returning to buildings that have not been properly inspected, and working during aftershocks or mental health crises.”

The earthquakes of February 6, 2023 killed more than 53,000 people in 11 Turkish provinces and displaced more than three million. In neighboring Syria, recent estimates put the death toll at between 5,000 and 8,500 people while tens of thousands have been displaced. More than half of the textile and clothing workers surveyed by the Gogger team said their homes were among those damaged.

Although the disaster left them struggling to find shelter for their families and meet their basic needs, more than 50% of workers surveyed said they only had two to four weeks of leave. While on leave, three-quarters of workers told researchers they received less than their full wages, and more than a third said they received no wages at all, creating severe financial pressure to return to work quickly.

“After the earthquake, I put my family in a safe place and returned to Malatya [province]“I stayed at the company headquarters for one month… and there was no place where I could shower and sleep comfortably,” one worker told researchers.

A year after the disaster, many workers are still separated from their families, according to Goger. “The workers who stayed [in the earthquake region] Despite all their mental and physical health problems, they cannot find housing; “They had to send their families to the cities and villages around Anatolia.” “From what we can see there is nothing of the mark to support even the basic need for housing.”

One of the worst countries in the world in terms of workers' rights

Turkey is one of the world's largest countries in terms of clothing and textile production, with exports reaching US$16.2 billion in 2021, according to a Turkish Trade Ministry report cited in the Clean Clothes Campaign report, mostly to European Union countries and the United States. . Suppliers in the quake-hit provinces played an important role in the sector, producing goods for prominent global buyers including Benetton, H&M, Primark and Zara as well as large local brands such as LC Waikiki.

The provinces affected by the earthquake accounted for 15 percent of Turkey's clothing and textile industry, and employed an estimated 350,000 workers in about 2,900 companies before the disaster.

In the year following the earthquake, employment in the garment sector fell by 40 percent and production by 50 percent, according to a press release sent to Equal Times by the Turkish Garment Manufacturers Association (TGSD) on the anniversary of the earthquake. The disaster. TGSD President Ramazan Kaya said in the statement that the recovery was hampered by the “loss of qualified jobs” in the region and difficulties in obtaining financing and loans.

Shortly after the disaster, the Turkish government imposed a temporary ban on layoffs throughout the disaster area. “But what we've seen is that if suppliers don't fear it enough, if the fines aren't high enough to deter it, they find other ways to fire workers,” Goger says.

The workers told her research team that they face “systematic and routine verbal harassment” by their employers. In the post-earthquake period, this practice, known as “mobbing”, often took the form of pressure to work overtime, when threatened with termination if they did not comply.

Turkey has consistently been ranked among the ten worst countries in the world for workers' rights in the International Trade Union Confederation's World Rights Index, with strike suppression and systematic union busting listed among the violations.

With freedom of association and the right to strike restricted in Turkey, 89% of workers in the textile and clothing industry in the earthquake zone – even those who belong to unions – do not have a collective bargaining agreement, according to a Clean Clothes Campaign report. In this climate, the layoff ban may have actually worsened the situation for some workers, as they would not receive severance pay or other benefits if they were forced out of work rather than being formally laid off.

“One year after the earthquakes, we can see that employment in the region has not yet recovered,” says Haluk Deniz Medit, spokesman for the Turkish textile workers union Desk Textil. “There is a serious contraction in exports and European brands, our most important customers, are shifting their orders to Asian countries.”

Supply chain flexibility at the expense of workers' rights

This kind of opportunism is all too common in the global clothing and textile industry, according to Maisha Begum, a researcher at the London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC). “What we've seen during COVID-19 and other crises is that brands can change their purchasing practices very quickly when it benefits them,” Begum says.

Natalie Swan, Director of the Labor Rights Program at the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, adds that many clothing-producing regions around the world are highly vulnerable to the impacts of the climate emergency, as well as to political and economic crises.

“As these flashpoints increasingly become the norm, [global] “Companies must use their resilience to deal with these crises in a way that improves supply chain resilience and workers’ ability to earn a living safely,” she says. “When there is a decline in profits, it should not be suppliers, and therefore workers, who are under pressure.”

Only 4 percent of textile and apparel suppliers in southeastern Turkey were able to resume production as usual after the earthquakes, according to a separate survey of regional suppliers conducted by Goger and colleagues in June 2023. However, only a few regional suppliers said the brands they serve offered any support. In the aftermath of the disaster; 69% of respondents said they had received no contact at all from buyers or brands.

In the same month, the Bahrain Human Rights Commission contacted 11 international clothing companies operating in the region to inquire about their procurement practices in the wake of the disaster. Only six brands said they were taking steps to protect workers at supplier factories, and only one said they were providing financial assistance to the families of workers killed in earthquakes. He did not provide any details about these procedures.

Aid donations such as those pledged by H&M Group and Inditex (Zara's parent company) to Save the Children, the Turkish Red Crescent Society and the Turkish Disaster Management Agency AFAD “don't really go to the workers,” says Goger.

“These companies are looking for PR campaigns rather than taking action to help their supply chains,” she adds. “There is a huge difference between what brands publicly say they do versus what happens in reality.”

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