"Trump’s Trade War Could Kill Lesotho’s Garment Industry", 16 Jul 2025

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A follow-through of the so-called “reciprocal” rate of 50 percent...could also be the undoing of its garment industry...Some 75 percent of the clothing it makes for brands such as JCPenney, Levi Strauss & Co., Reebok, The Children’s Place and Wrangler owner Kontoor Brands are earmarked for the United States....Some Trump-branded Greg Norman golf shirts are made in Lesotho, too...

Orders started evaporating in April, when the initial tariffs were announced, and a significant fraction of Lesotho’s 30,000 mostly female garment workers were furloughed or laid off beginning in June...

If the African Growth and Opportunity Act, or AGOA, isn’t renewed in September, the entire garment industry could cease to exist, the government has said...

...only Levi’s responded to say that its plans have remained “unchanged.” The denim giant is a prominent client of Nien Hsing Textile Group...A spokesman from Nien Hsing Textile Group said that Nien Hsing Lesotho has orders until the first quarter of 2026, though he would not say if there have been or will be further layoffs...

Facilities employing thousands of people, such as Precious Garments, Tzicc Clothing Manufactures and Maseru-E Textiles, haven’t fielded orders since the tariff was originally announced, said Solong Senohe, secretary-general at the United Textile Employees Union, or UNITE, which has been negotiating worker settlements with various owners.

Precious Garments, he said, has started rotating employees on shifts that have them working just two weeks out of each month. Many of UNITE’s members, however, have been placed on “short-term layoff” without pay until September...

Most of the workers whose livelihoods are now hanging by a thread don’t know what they will do if they remain unemployed...They worry that when schools reopen later this month, they’re not going to be able to afford the fees. Or worse, that they will lose the literal roof over their head...When their savings run out, workers could find themselves resorting to the most dangerous jobs. Parents could be forced to traffic their children....

Senohe said that factory owners were told by brands that their companies had “no say in this” because the state of affairs was directed by the U.S. government and they cannot increase the prices of the products they buy...

“The buyers are not willing to pay the tariffs,” Senohe said. “...The factories are doing it. The reason they are exporting from Lesotho is the cheap labor that gives them more profit. It is, unfortunately, how capitalism works. It sucks your blood and whatever to make profit and then, at the end of the day, it dumps you.”

And come September, if nothing changes, mass firings will begin in earnest. Factories that depend on U.S. orders, too, will have no choice but to close...

“I think the worst scenario is going to be that people are going to cross the border into South Africa as illegal migrants,” Senohe said. “There is a textile hub in the city of Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal, where most of the people are illegal and you’re harassed every day by the police. Some of them are going to go to the illegal mines in South Africa. If somebody comes up and says, ‘I have work for you in South Africa,’ they will go there. And then we don’t know if we’ll ever see them again.”