All Work. No Freedom.

The Forced Labour Behind High Street Clothing.

Comfy T-shirts, vests and leggings – all made from knitted cotton jersey – are key staples of most wardrobes, particularly during Covid lockdowns.

Many of these garments are made in Tamil Nadu in South India, where hundreds of thousands of young women and girls are recruited from poor rural areas to move to the towns to work in spinning mills and garment factories.

Forced labour and exploitative conditions

Labour rights abuses in these factories are extreme and widespread. Pay rates are low, trade unions are banned and working hours long. The young women workers live in hostels owned by the factories, making it virtually impossible for them to refuse to work when the company demands 12+ hour days, sometimes 7 days a week.

Alongside forced labour, other recorded abuses include child labour (most are aged between 14 and 18, but some are younger), discrimination (caste and gender), strict limits on freedom (women are often unable to leave the hostels or visit family), unsafe working conditions and sexual harassment.

Campaigning for change

​Determined campaigning by trade unions and NGOs in India and beyond has had some impact and high-street retailers are under pressure to demonstrate they are taking action.

HWW has been working on these issues since 2011, initially investigating ‘sumangali schemes’, a form of bonded labour where young women were contracted to live and work in the mills for years at a time. They were paid pocket money, but if they completed the contract, their families received a lump sum, to provide a dowry and enable them to marry. Alongside other NGOs, HWW commissioned research with women workers, providing evidence of serious labour rights abuses.

The UK’s Ethical Trading Initiative (a multi-stakeholder initiative made up of companies, trade unions and NGOs set up to address poor working conditions in international supply chains) responded by establishing their Tamil Nadu MSI Programme, which ran training courses for young women workers.

As a member of the ETI we participated in this programme, questioning the initial focus on health rather than labour rights issues, and highlighting the importance of keeping the women workers’ demands at the centre of this work. Because progress was slow, in 2015 we also made a formal complaint against several ETI member companies. The outcome of this is detailed in this parallel report.

In 2019, HWW returned to Tamil Nadu, shadowing a training session run by the ETI's programme, and meeting with local NGOs and trade unions, and then feeding back our reflections to the ETI staff leading the project.

Although local organisations confirmed that the sumangali schemes were now illegal, they were clear that serious labour rights problems continue. Young women workers are still often confined to the hostels for 6 or 7 days a week, and forced to work very long hours for low wages.

They cannot join trade unions, and the pressure to complete orders on time leads to high levels of harassment and abuse.  In 2021, a young woman worker from a mill supplying many high street brands was killed by her factory supervisor, allegedly after months of sexual harassment.

We’re continuing our work in this sector. SAVE, one of our partners on the Hidden Homeworkers programme, is currently working both with homeworkers and piece rate workers in the factories in Tamil Nadu.