GAP- Guilty And Proud

GAP and associating brands including Old Navy and Banana Republic are guilty of having suppliers from some of the worst human working conditions. They currently are responsible for over 75% of total production at the New Collections Limited factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh where 3,750 workers are being forced to work over 100 hour weeks with little to no pay. It has been a publicly known fact for 2 and a half years and minimal efforts (if any) have been made to fix this problem. A 20 year old woman recently lost her baby during her seventh month of pregnancy due to an extreme amount of hours worked, while working on Old Navy jeans. The following is an executive summary of an article released by globallabourrights.org who did extensive research on Old Navy's partnership with New Collections Limited. 

"Executive Summary

Next Collections Sweatshop, part of the Ha-Meem Group in Bangladesh

• The 3,750-worker Next Collections factory in Ashulia, Bangladesh on the outskirts of Dhaka is part of the Ha-Meem Group, Bangladesh’s second largest garment exporter which owns 26 factories and employs over 30,000 workers.
• At the Next Collections sweatshop, approximately 70 percent of production is for Gap and Old Navy.  Gap is the largest specialty apparel chain in the U.S.
• Next Collections workers are forced to toil 14- to 17-plus-hour shifts, seven days a week, routinely putting in workweeks of over 100 hours.  Workers are visibly sick and exhausted from the grueling and excessive hours.
• Workers live in poverty, earning just 20 to 24 cents per hour.
• Physical punishment and illegal firings are the norm.
• Pregnant women are illegally terminated and denied their legal paid maternity leave.
• For the last two-and-a-half years, Gap has been complicit with Next Collections/Ha-Meem Group in a scam to defraud the workers of their legal wages and benefits.

─ Management hands out phony pay slips to pretend that Gap is in compliance with legal hours and wages.
─ Workers are paid in cash, off the books and cheated of 15 percent of their grueling overtime hours.  At Next Collections alone, workers are being robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and millions if one includes all the factories of the Ha-Meem Group.

• Workers live in miserable poverty in tiny primitive hovels.  By the third week in a month, most have no money left for food.
• Bangladesh garment workers continue to be the hardest workers in the world and are also among the poorest."

Unlike Nike I had a very hard time finding any statements given from the company and overall it publicly seems they have simply ignored it this far. As one of the top US retailers, they have consumer power not to address the current situation and it's not as if many people seem to mind. 

In 1999 GAP was on of 18 companies caught in a major lawsuit against the mistreatment of workers in Saipan, resulting in a $20 million compensation payment to the workers.

In 2004 a report was released by the CEO of GAP stating that GAP was addressing the problem head on and released a 40 page report outlining the steps they planned on taking. 

In 2007 the police raided an illegal manufacturing factory that kept 18 children between the ages of 8 and 15 with little to no pay. The children were forced to work and were rescued by a reporter who pretended to be a fashion boutique owner from London. Police rescued the children and reunited them with there families, but the troubling part was that GAP was supposedly aware of all of this and agreed to continue gaining supplies from them. 

In 2014 it appeared that GAP had finally took matters seriously and launched an investigation to there Bangladesh supplier. The full report is in the link below, but it appears that GAP has at least become aware of the major problems existing. People are being threatened death, sexual and physical abuse, many are not just threatened. Pregnant women are being forced to work up to 23 hours a day, and in some documented cases their unborn children are dying. GAP has launched investigations and has attempted to address these problems by firing those in charge of the factory, raising wages and surveying employees to see what they felt needed to be improved most. However, at the end of the report it states that not much has actually changed and many workers are back to working in there poor conditions. It will be an uphill battle to abolish sweatshops completely but I was pleasantly surprised to know that attempts were being made. GAP, in my opinion, is one of the shadier companies in regards to the fact that they make up 75% of sales from these factories therefore having the power to dictate what goes on there based on the fact that without them as a client the factory would have no demands. Even with this power the sweatshop continues to mistreat, abuse, scam and over work thousands of people every single day. As the third largest retailer in the world GAP has the power and the duty to correct what is going on in their factories consistently. I feel compelled to insist that until GAP gains a sense of morals they should not be receiving a ton of negative publicity from consumers. 

http://www.globallabourrights.org/alerts/gap-next-collections-bangladesh 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1567849/Gap-sweatshop-children-saved-in-India-raid.html