The Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC), an international organization protecting workers in clothing production, accuses factories and brands of abandoning workers after the devastating earthquake in Turkey in February last year.
“Since most of them were not fully paid after the earthquake, the workers had to return to work due to financial hardship, without safe housing and before the factories where they worked had undergone a structural safety inspection.” , says the CCC’s recently published report “The impact of the earthquake on textile and garment workers”.
This result is based on a survey of 130 workers from the earthquake-damaged cities of Gaziantep, Kahramanmaraş, Malatya and Adıyaman, conducted between August and September 2023.
The report describes the difficult working conditions that earthquake victims faced, such as unsafe jobs, low wages and verbal harassment. Some of these problems existed before the earthquake but were exacerbated by the natural disaster. For the factories, it was more important to fulfill orders than to consider the well-being of their workers. As a result, many had to go back to work shortly after the earthquake, often before the structural safety of the factories had been checked. More than 50 percent of those surveyed reported that there had been no inspection of the factory buildings.
In addition, 35 percent of the workers surveyed did not receive wages, which led to financial difficulties and also forced employees to return to work – often before they could take care of their own families and their own housing situation. In some cases, those who were unable to return to work lost their right to severance pay.
Contracts do not cover disasters such as earthquakes
The study confirms and extends the results of an earlier survey conducted in August by the Middle East Technical University in Istanbul. The new report reflects the CCC’s March 2023 appeal, which calls on brands to ensure that workers in their supply chains are safe and their rights are respected. Bego Demir from the Clean Clothes Campaign Turkey and one of the authors of the report says: “The earthquake of February 2023 clearly shows that the well-being of workers is not protected by existing global agreements and compromises. New agreements and solutions are needed, that are specifically tailored to crises such as an earthquake. The Pay Your Workers agreement represents one such option.”