Frequently Asked Questions

What evidence is there that Hanes is guilty of sweatshop practices?

There is overwhelming evidence that Hanes has and continues to violate the rights of its workers at the TOS Dominican factory in the Dominican Republic.

The Worker Rights Consortium, a widely respected independent monitoring organization which represents 175 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, published a detailed report on the factory. The report found that the factory has violated workers’ rights in multiple ways, including verbal harassment, forced and under-compensated overtime, failure to pay night employees correctly for severance and vacation, the coercion of workers’ to sign statements giving up the right to complain about the company’s scheduling practices, and egregious violations of workers’ rights to unionize. According to the report, management has spied on union members outside of the factory, interrogated workers about their membership in the union, and fired workers en masse who refuse to resign from the union. In addition, the worker testimonies presented on this website are first-person accounts of life at the factory from the factory’s workers. They describe in detail the abusive and unsafe working conditions at the factory. There is simply no doubt that abusive practices are taking place.

As United Students Against Sweatshops, we have met personally with workers from the factory and have heard directly about its abuses. We made a commitment to these workers that we would stand by them and support their cause until the violations are stopped.

It is also worth noting that this is not the first time that Hanes has been caught using sweatshop labor. An October 2006 investigation by the National Labor Committee found egregious worker rights violations at a Hanes contract factory in Bangladesh called Harvest Rich. These abuses included child labor, forced and unpaid overtime, and unpaid wages, among other egregious violations. Yet instead of staying to correct the situation, Hanes abandoned the factory, leaving workers without jobs. TOS Dominicana and Harvest Rich are just the most recent cases in a long history of Hanes’ sweatshop practices.

Why are we asking Jennifer Love Hewitt for help?

As a celebrity endorser of Hanes products and a popular actress, Jennifer Love Hewitt has tremendous power to stop these abuses. We know that Hanes values Ms. Hewitt’s services as a spokesperson for the company and wishes to continue this lucrative relationship. And we know that if Ms. Hewitt told Hanes that she could no longer help Hanes sell its products unless the abuses at TOS Dominicana are stopped, we know that Hanes would listen. We have tried for over a year to persuade Hanes to correct these abominable conditions. They have refused to act, and in fact the situation is now even worse. So now we are turning to Jennifer Love Hewitt for help. We need her influence and her leadership to compel Hanes to stop these egregious abuses.

How has Hanes responded to our appeal to stop the abuses?

Since labor and human rights groups first began expressing concern to Hanes about the situation at TOS Dominicana in November 2006, Hanes has consistently taken the position that none of the allegations are true. Indeed, Hanes has gone so far as to say that the factory in question, TOS Dominicana, is an "employer of choice." Hanes' efforts to white wash the situation have been truly incredible. Instead of contracting a reputable monitoring organization to conduct an investigation of the abuses - which center around illegal union-busting - Hanes took the amazing step of hiring a law firm, Oagletree Deakis, which boasts about its speciality in, of all things, helping companies bust unions! Not surprisingly, this notorious union-busting law firm gave Hanes a clean bill of health.

This is unfortunately not the first time that a major apparel corporation has denied sweatshop practices – even when there is clear evidence of such abuses. In fact, it is the same response initially given by Kathy Lee Gifford and Nike when sweatshop practices were revealed in their contract factories around the world more than a decade ago. But Hanes’ claim that nothing is wrong in the current case may represent a new height in corporate irresponsibility – given just how much detailed evidence there already is on the public record about the abuses at TOS Dominicana. The truth is that these violations are real and they are serious, and Hanes’ attempt to deny, deny, deny does not change that fact. Only actually correcting the abuses will.

How has Jennifer Love Hewitt responded to our appeal for help?

United Students Against Sweatshops has written to Ms. Hewitt repeatedly to ask for her help to end the abuses. To date, we have received no substantive response. We are asking that Jennifer Love Hewitt speak publicly to condemn the sweatshop practices at TOS Dominicana and to demand that the abuses are ended immediately. If Hanes fails to end the abuses, we ask that Ms. Hewitt sever her relationship to Hanes and stop endorsing Hanes products.

What is United Students Against Sweatshops?

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is an international student movement of campuses and individual students fighting for sweatshop free labor conditions and workers' rights. Founded in the mid-1990’s, and representing students on some 200 campuses in the U.S. and abroad, USAS has been a leader in the fight to end abusive labor practices in the global apparel industry, among other sectors. USAS successfully worked to get hundreds of universities in the United States and Canada to adopt anti-sweatshop policies for the shirts, hats, and other apparel that bears our universities’ logos. USAS also helped created the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring organization which now represents 175 university administrations, to investigate labor conditions and enforce the university anti-sweatshop policies. USAS has stood with workers on all continents to demand respect for their basic rights.

Read more about USAS’ history.

What specifically is needed to stop the abuses?

Hanes must take immediate action to stop each of the ongoing labor rights abuses at TOS Dominicana. These include verbal harassment and abuse, undercompensated overtime, failure to compensate night workers correctly, and unsafe conditions, among others. But above all, Hanes must cease violations of workers’ rights to join a trade union and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. In order to improve conditions, workers have organized a union with broad support at the factory. But factory management has responded with an unrelenting campaign of intimidation and retaliation – interrogating workers about their union membership, spying on workers on union meetings outside of the factory, and firing workers who refuse to resign from the union. We believe that the many abuses at the factory can be quickly corrected if management ceases its illegal union busting campaign and instead works with the worker representatives to provide decent labor conditions. Management should immediately recognize the union and negotiate a collective bargaining agreement.

In order to get to this point, we believe that it will be necessary for Hanes to replace the individual members of management responsible for the illegal campaign of intimidation, most notably, the company’s notoriously abusive human resources director, Ely Ureña.

What can I do to help?

There are many ways you can help. Here are a few:

Sign our letter to Jennifer Love Hewitt, asking her to help end these abuses.

 

A project of United Students Against Sweatshops