"Fruit of the Loom Turns Rotten on Worker Rights", 14 February 2025

...Fruit of the Loom recently announced that it will be closing two unionized factories in Honduras, Jerzees Nuevo Día and Confecciones Dos Caminos, that have been a beacon of progress in respect for worker rights at not only the company but across Honduras’ entire garment manufacturing industry. The closure of the factories will have a devastating impact on more than 3,000 employees and their families...

In 2008, Fruit of the Loom...responded to its Honduran workers seeking to improve their labor conditions, by closing a recently unionized factory... An investigation by...the Worker Rights Consortium, found overwhelming evidence that Fruit of the Loom closed the factory in retaliation for workers exercising their right to freedom of association by forming a union...

In November 2009, Fruit of the Loom made a historic decision to end this repressive approach to labor relations by opening a new factory in the same town as the shuttered facility and hiring workers from it. This new facility was named Jerzees Nuevo Día – “a New Day at Jerzees”...In a historic agreement with workers and their union, Fruit of the Loom not only agreed to open the new factory and provide employment to the union members it had fired but also committed to respect workers’ rights to unionize at all the facilities it owns in Honduras...

Over the following fourteen years, workers successfully established unions at nearly all the company’s other factories in Honduras, including at the Confecciones Dos Caminos plant, where they negotiated collective bargaining agreements to improve working conditions...

In the decade that followed, workers were successful in establishing independent unions and improving labor conditions at dozens of Honduran garment factories, including plants owned by major brands like Hanes and Gildan...

In a pattern seen previously in the garment industries of other countries, after their Honduran workers began to win basic rights and improve their working conditions, Fruit of the Loom and other North American factory owners began closing the plants they operated in the country. Of the six garment factories it operated in Honduras in 2010, Fruit of the Loom in Honduras has already closed or announced the impending closure of five. Fruit of the Loom’s sole garment factory in Honduras that is not slated for closure is nonunion.

Import-export data shows that, at the same time that Fruit of the Loom has been closing its own unionized apparel factories in Honduras, the company dramatically increased its imports to the United States of apparel that it purchased from third-party supplier factories in other countries, such as Bangladesh. This data showed that, between 2023 and 2024, Fruit of the Loom’s annual imports of apparel from these third-party supplier factories – where workers do not have the labor rights protections afforded to the company’s unionized Honduran employees – increased from 8.5 million pounds to 12.3 million pounds.[1]

...Instead of building on the high-road approach to worker rights it had adopted in Honduras, Fruit of the Loom now appears to be turning to the same low-road “sweatshop” sourcing strategy pursued by some of the least responsible brands in the global garment industry...