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The garment industry has created approximately 60 million jobs globally, with the majority of these concentrated in Asia. However, it has not generated decent and good quality employment for the majority of its workforce. Rather, the creation of non-standard forms of work and insecure employment, without union rights or strong enforcement institutions, resulting in wage theft for garment workers, has become the norm in global apparel supply chains.

... Wage theft is a central aspect of the business models of global apparel brands, and not an unintended result of crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It comes as no surprise then, that far from protecting the wages of workers in their supply chains during the pandemicinduced recession, global apparel brands engaged in harmful actions that aggravated and magnified the intrinsic condition of wage Introduction 3 theft in their supply chains

... This report studies the manner in which the most brutal impacts of the recession on the global apparel industry were absorbed by the poorest workers, disproportionately comprising of women from vulnerable socioeconomic groups in Asia. It analyses how the actions of brands during the pandemic impacted employment relationships in their supplier factories, resulting in widespread wage theft and severe humanitarian consequences for workers in their supply chains.

...Three interrelated conclusions can be inferred from the findings of the report.

One, the stagnation of workers’ wages at poverty levels results in the lack of any form of resilience to crisis, causing workers to fall below the poverty line and slip into extreme poverty immediately.

Two, wage theft of workers with poverty-level wages constitutes a human rights violation as workers and their households are forced to reduce consumption below minimum survival levels and incur increased debt, thereby getting trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and indebtedness.

Three, brands caused and contributed to human rights violations of workers in their supply chains through their actions before and during the pandemic-induced recession. The management practices and harmful actions of brands, which are deeply entrenched and legitimised within their supply chains, translated into harmful employment practices in their supplier factories, which in turn led to different forms of wage theft experienced by workers.

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