Are Poor Social Audits Fueling Migrant Worker Abuse in Mauritius’s Garment Industry?
Nearly a year after a damning exposé threw a spotlight on severely exploitative conditions in Mauritius’s garment industry that included indicators of forced labor, workers are still in a holding pattern that has seen little meaningful progress.
Among them is “Abdul,” a Bangladeshi national who was drawn to the East African nation after a recruitment agent swore he could earn four times as much as the $150 he was eking out as a garment factory operator every month, just for doing the same work.
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“The middleman told me, ‘You will get a salary of 50,000 [Bangladeshi] taka ($418) per month,’” he told researchers from Transparentem, a New York-based nonprofit that investigates environmental and human rights abuses in global supply chains. “Food and accommodation will be provided by the company. They said many things, but actually there was no similarity between their words and reality. There was only one thing that matched—that was the name of the company that I would come to, DDI.”
DDI is Denim de l’Ile, a self-described “sustainable” vertical denim mill in Rivière du Rempart that churns out 6 million meters of denim and 3.5 million garments every year for companies that have included Armani, Asos, Hudson Jeans owner Centric Brands, Diesel, G-Star Raw, Hobbs and Whistles parent The Forschini Group, Wrangler owner Kontoor Brands and Silver Jeans Co. parent Western Glove Works.
By the time he learned the truth, Abdul said, it was too late. Toiling in a poorly ventilated factory by day and sleeping fitfully in a bug-infested dormitory by night, thousands of miles away from his family, he struggled to pay off the $1,600 the agent had demanded to secure the position. It didn’t help that Abdul was making less than half of what he was promised—nor that food and lodging were deducted from his wages every month. Including interest, paying off the loans he took out eventually cost him more than $4,000.
Work, too, was punishing, both physically and psychologically. “From 7:30 in the morning to 7:30 [at night], we have to produce 1,200 pieces,” Abdul said. “If we cannot meet the target, then they tell us off. They insult us, saying, ‘You haven’t met your production target. What will you do?’”
That the agent told Abdul to keep the recruitment fee a secret should have been a warning sign. So should have been the fact, he said, that the employment contract he signed—which Abdul later found out had listed his “real” wage of $230—was in English, which he couldn’t read. Before Abdul could take the job, he was forced to record a video falsely stating that he paid zero fees. It was that, the agent said, or stay in Bangladesh. The money was gone either way.
DDI is one of four manufacturers that Transparentem spent two years delving into as part of its broader work in responsible recruitment, an issue that the American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA), a prominent trade group, and the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a multi-stakeholder group, have also been working to tackle through their combined corporate membership, which cuts a wide swath of the fashion industry.
As of October, 100 brands and retailers, including Centric Brands, Diesel, G-Star Raw and Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp., have signed the AAFA/FLA Industry Commitment to Responsible Recruitment, which requires signatories to incorporate into their social compliance standards, such as their codes of conduct, a pledge to promote conditions where no workers pay for their job, are denied access to their travel documents or are misinformed about the terms of their employment. They must also periodically report on what they’re doing to imbed elements of the commitment in their policies and processes, such as through their sustainability reporting or modern slavery disclosures.
“As an industry and as individual companies, we are committed to the fair treatment of workers in the apparel, footwear and travel goods supply chains,” the commitment says. “One important part of this ongoing effort is working together to eliminate conditions that can lead to forced labor in the countries from which we source products.”
In August 2023, four months before Transparentem published its initial report, the AAFA and FLA, together with e-tailer Asos, business association Amfori and multi-stakeholder organization the Ethical Trading Initiative, co-signed a letter that it sent the Mauritius government. The missive applauded the work that the industry, through the Mauritius Exporters Association, the trade group also known as MEXA, had done to establish a code of conduct to protect workers, including those of migrant extraction. But it also raised concerns about reports from the U.S. government, the United Nations and Transparentem’s own work about labor trafficking, abusive living conditions and underpayment of wages in the garment sector, which undermines the “long-term sustainability of businesses sourcing from Mauritius.”
What came from the letter was a “real mixed bag,” said Sheela Ahluwalia, director of policy and advocacy at Transparentem. There were updated guidelines that increased the minimum wage for migrant workers by 40 percent but continue to allow companies to deduct wages for food and accommodation, which has confused applicants during the recruitment process, she said. The 2023 Private Recruitment Agencies Act enshrined the principle that workers should not pay for their jobs but didn’t clarify that agents must not charge them fees. And this past July, Mauritius enacted the Finance (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act of 2024, which amended other laws including the Private Recruitment Agencies Act and Workers’ Rights Act.
“This new act introduced a category of ‘labor contractors’—essentially Mauritian private recruitment agents who will directly employ migrant workers and contract them to local workplaces called ‘hirer employees,’” Ahluwalia said. “So this law is a step in the wrong direction, as the ‘hirer employer’ is not actually the legal employer and not fully liable to the worker for fair terms and conditions of employment.”
Two months later, the U.S. Department of Labor added Mauritius to its list of goods made with forced labor for the first time, citing Transparentem’s research as one of the reasons for its determination.
Same stories, dueling opinions
Abdul’s story matched, practically beat for beat, with others that Transparentem gleaned from 80 workers from DDI, Firemount Group, R.E.A.L. Garments and Aquarelle Clothing, the latter three hailing from the island’s Port Louis district, from 2022 to 2023. All have overlapping buyers: Firemount supplies to firms such as Billabong operator Boardriders, Boden, The Forschini Group, John Lewis Partnership, Kontoor Brands, Rodd & Gunn, WE Fashion and Woolworths in South Africa; R.E.A.L. to the likes of Armani, Barbour, Foxcroft, Diesel, PVH Corp., Rodd & Gunn and Second Clothing; and Aquarelle to The Forschini Group, PVH Corp. and Rodd & Gunn.
According to the International Labour Organization, red flags such as deception, intimidation and threats, debt bondage, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime are indicators of forced labor. In some cases, even the presence of a single indicator in a given situation may suggest that forced labor exists, it says.
Two of the suppliers were quick to counter the charges. Aquarelle, which describes itself as a “responsible entity committed to ethical standards within the fashion supply chain, denied that its employees pay any recruitment-related costs. It said it “consistently ensures” fair working conditions through regular audits with Sedex and Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production, a.k.a. WRAP. R.E.A.L., which described the report as “disappointing and surprising,” said it undergoes regular audits from well-regarded organizations and none have corroborated Transparentem’s findings. “We cannot be led to believe that this single report reflects the complete story whereas all other instances failed to do so,” a spokesperson added.
DDI deferred to MEXA, which said that while independent audits had “failed to confirm” some of the central concerns that Transparentem raised, it recognizes the weaknesses of the current migrant employment system. Among the measures MEXA says it and its members are prioritizing is working with the government to establish a “robust and transparent” framework for recruiting and employing migrant labor. The organization is also encouraging authorities to implement bilateral agreements with the workers’ countries of origin that spell out any recruitment fees. Firemount didn’t respond to a request for comment, but it sent Transparentem, shortly before the report went out, a report by WRAP showing that its facility was “in compliance with WRAP principles,” which includes the prohibition of forced labor. WRAP did not directly address its work with Firemount, but it said that it is aware of the issues involved in Mauritius and operates “on the belief that it is far more productive to encourage continuous substantive progress in facilities than to just walk away.”
Transparentem, for its part, stands by its investigation. The workers it spoke to describe the ways factories would hide problems from the auditors. Such was the case for “Ahmed,” who moved from Bangladesh to Mauritius for the promise of better pay at R.E.A.L. Garments. To cover the recruitment fees, plus expenses, he was compelled to pay, Ahmed borrowed $2,300 that quickly swelled to more than $11,500 because of exorbitant interest rates. Like Abdul, Ahmed earned $230 per month, substantially lower than the 50,000 taka his recruitment agent said he would be raking in after six months. The factory also assigned him a different role and department than what the agent had promised. He said he couldn’t quit because he couldn’t afford the plane ticket to go home.
Then there were the dormitories, which were overcrowded, unsanitary and riddled with roaches, Ahmed said. The quality of the food workers were given was also so deplorable, he added, that some workers collected firewood from the jungle at night so they could cook their own meals. The hours were long and filled with threats of suspension without pay or deportation.
None of this was on display when the auditors came, according to Ahmed. “If at any time people came for audits and inspections, the company would clean up before that,” he said. “And those who they would ask to speak were prepared beforehand so that they did not say anything against the company.”
‘Adapt or perish’
While the plight of migrant workers isn’t new to Mauritius or even to the garment industry as a whole, it’s a problem that has been slowly coming to the forefront as scrutiny over forced labor in apparel production intensifies. Transparentem covered the illegal employment and rampant abuse of Bangladeshi nationals who made clothes for Bonobos, Brooks Brothers, L.L. Bean and other prominent labels in Malaysia in 2019. The same year, Asos hit headlines for leaping into action after the closure of Tex Knits in Mauritius left 180 workers, more than half of them migrants from Bangladesh, without pay, food or sufficient shelter. And last month, the AAFA and FLA rallied 50 of their members, including Adidas, Gap Inc., Nike and J.Crew Group, to sign a letter, as part of another Transparentem initiative, urging Taiwan’s minister of economic affairs to protect migrant laborers from steep recruitment fees and abusive working and living conditions, reports of which have been increasingly rearing their heads.
“Unfortunately, it is no secret that Mauritius, similar to other economies, has opted to leverage its competitiveness through the overexploitation of migrant workers,” Reeaz Chutto, president of Confédération des Travailleurs des Secteurs Publique et Privé, said in a statement through IndustriALL, of which the union is an affiliate. “If a migrant worker dares to denounce their employer for ill-treatment or abuse they are deported overnight. Either you adapt or perish.”
The solicitation of high recruitment fees is particularly egregious because it has a long-term, cumulative effect of decreasing worker power as individuals are dragged deeper into debt, said Isobel Archer, a senior researcher who focuses on labor and migrant worker rights at the nonprofit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. That no remedy mechanism currently exists to fix this is another problem.
“I think we’re at a stage now in the business and human rights movement where the excuse of not owning factories or not having oversight simply doesn’t wash,” she said. “And that’s absolutely true for the garment sector as well.”
Labor groups regularly cite the dissonance between brands’ oft-ballyhooed commitment to ethical production and what they’ll tolerate in their relentless drive to maximize volumes and profits at any cost, human or otherwise. Transparentem founder and president Ben Skinner, like many who work in the human rights space, has long criticized the ability of social audits to be “effectively and systematically gamed” despite the industry’s reliance on them to determine on-the-ground conditions in factories far afield from corporate headquarters in North America and Europe. Of the brands that responded to emailed queries, many spoke of auditing as both a safeguard against and a solution for workplace violations. The inadequate talisman that is the audit, he said, is only matched by the hapless invocation of the code of conduct.
Social audits, for the most part, are not built to be “victim-oriented investigative efforts,” Skinner added. Suppliers have all the incentive in the world to dodge the demerits they might receive for perpetuating abusive practices. Workers are frequently coached, records falsified and inspectors bribed to present idealized conditions during the brief time audits take place. At times, workers are skipped over entirely because why ask questions if you don’t think you’ll like the answers? Different auditors representing different brands, in fact, can also provide wildly disparate ratings for a comparable number of violations found in the same facility, according to experts. They say that instead of using audits to improve labor standards, the industry is trapped in a cycle of assessments and remediations that misses the bigger picture.
“I think the system has really failed the workers,” said Skinner. “You have this $85 billion auditing industry—of which social audits are a small but growing piece—which, as we found in many of these factories, is completely ill-equipped to detect forced labor.” He said that Transparentem, in contrast, spent a large amount of time building trust with workers—the same ones who took a “leap of faith” to risk everything by “telling the truth.”
Making things right—or not
Bangladeshis aren’t the majority of migrant workers in Mauritius but they’re certainly a “plurality,” Skinner said. The U.S. Department of State estimates that nearly 36,000 foreign nationals from Bangladesh, India, Madagascar, Sri Lanka and Nepal are employed in the 1.3-million-strong nation’s garment, textile, manufacturing and construction sectors.
Skinner said that the nonprofit’s probe into the four manufacturers presented “among the worst conditions we’d ever seen,” though it was difficult to “categorically” say why. What he could speak decisively about was the stark difference in engagement among the 18 brands contacted. Though a number of the companies formed buyers groups to hire auditors such as Verité and LRQA to investigate Transparentem’s findings—reportedly confirming some but questioning others—only Barbour, PVH Corp. and Second Clothing said they would repay workers at R.E.A.L. Garments for recruitment fees. PVH Corp. took on the bulk of the responsibility with a commitment of $390,456, which it said was calculated based on its production capacity, followed by Barbour with $19,523 and Second Clothing with $10,614. A PVH representative said an independent audit it conducted at Aquarelle Clothing found no evidence of high recruitment fees for migrant workers.
Transparentem said that seven businesses did not participate in remediation, meaning they did not even engage in the audits: Armani, Asos, Boardriders, Foxcroft, John Lewis Partnership, Kontoor Brands and Western Glove Works.
If there’s one company that stands out from the lineup, it’s Asos. When Tex Knits’ shuttering in 2019 left workers with no recourse, the e-tailer waded in with local unions, the factory’s liquidators and the Mauritian government to repatriate those who wished to go home and find jobs for those who wanted to be redeployed elsewhere. It later helped establish the country’s first migrant resource center in collaboration with the Modern Slavery Innovation Fund of the U.K. Home Office, IndustriALL Global Union and local trade union Confederation des Travailleurs des Secteurs Publique et Prive. Two years later, the Topshop and Miss Selfridges owner funneled more cash to Anti-Slavery International to support the center’s work. In 2022, it collaborated with the center and Anti-Slavery International on the Just Good Work Mauritius app, which informs migrant workers of their rights and allows them to report abuse.
Asos said that the company split from DDI at the end of 2022 and so has “limited commercial leverage” to engage with the supplier on remediation efforts, although it engaged with other buyers throughout the investigation and offered to support efforts “where required.”
“Following the publication of Transparentem’s report, we reviewed and strengthened our approach and have taken steps to enhance our due diligence processes in our Mauritius supply chains,” a spokesperson said.
More audits, more problems
Asos wasn’t the only buyer that claimed to have stopped sourcing from the manufacturers by the time Transparentem began its investigation. Armani and John Lewis Partnership said the same, though Armani added it maintains an “open dialogue in order to find common solutions to be adopted” and has “allocated significant resources to further investigate and seek remediation or improvement where possible for the workers.” (Boardriders, Foxcroft, Kontoor Brands and Western Glove Works did not respond to requests for comment.)
Even so, none of those without existing trading relationships have denied that they were contracting from those same factories when the alleged abuses took place, Skinner said. He pointed out that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development guidelines for responsible business conduct recommend that companies should help remedy the harm that their business activity might have caused. In short, Skinner said, it’s the Pottery Barn rule: “If you broke it, you bought it.”
“There’s one that I think is a sad but still all too true reality, which is that brands and retailers in the apparel industry tend to continue to have these short-term, transactional relationships with their suppliers, and that’s a problem,” he said. “And after [the collapse of] Rana Plaza, there was a lot of soul-searching around this and brands said, ‘Well, we’re going to do better.’ And I think our work in Mauritius, if nothing else, shows that many of them have not done better and are not doing better.”
Back to audits: Just as perplexing for Transparentem was the reluctance of brands to share the assessment results even though they underpinned claims that some of the allegations made by workers, such as the existence of high recruitment fees, couldn’t be confirmed. Repeated requests were stonewalled. Verité, which the buyer groups for DDI, Firemount and R.E.A.L. used, couldn’t comply because it was bound by non-disclosure agreements. And though LRQA, which was previously known as Elevate, did not respond to a request for comment, it was likely shackled by the same.
“Nobody would show us what was in those Verité audits,” Skinner said. “We don’t blame Verité for this; the brands obviously have the ability to share those audits, but they refused. At the end of the day, the workers’ voices aren’t being heard except for those courageous individuals who spoke to us.”
But Verité said that the buyer group’s responses not only did not accurately reflect its findings, some mischaracterized or selectively excerpted them in a way that was misleading. The civil society organization, for instance, said that its assessments found widespread evidence of recruitment fees being charged, including up to $2,300 at one factory. At another, close to 100 workers declined to disclose how much they paid to recruitment agents for fear of retaliation and only felt comfortable divulging the payments they made to other parties for internal travel and food. These mischaracterizations and omissions were portrayed by Transparentem as Verité failing to corroborate Transparentem’s allegations, it said.
“The Verité report clearly stated these workers paid prohibited recruitment fees and that employer procedures for detecting, remediating, and preventing these practices were deficient,” a Verité spokesperson said. “Verité findings related to deception, intimidation and threats, and grievance mechanisms were also not fairly reflected in the published buyer responses and Transparentem’s report. Buyer groups declined Verité’s request to share the reports with Transparentem.”
All this is another “glaring example” of the failures of private regulation, said Ahluwalia, noting that these failures have major consequences, such as the continued exploitation of workers.
“At minimum, investors, governments, certifiers and others should insist that audit reports can only be used to assess compliance if they are publicly available,” she said. “With audit transparency, impacted workers, communities, and other stakeholders can provide oversight and hold misleading actors accountable and consumers can make truly informed, ethical purchasing decisions.”
Waiting for relief
Transparentem says that despite the time that has passed, workers continue to report that they’re still experiencing labor abuses. There has also been little development on the remediation front, whether from brands or by the Mauritian government. While Barbour, PVH Corp. and Second Clothing told Transparentem that they’ve inked an agreement with R.E.A.L to “support the logistics of a plan” to implement their repayments in August, no other brand has responded to Transparentem’s calls for repayment. Neither has any company taken up the organization’s calls to invest in worker-driven grievance mechanisms for the migrant community, provide a Mauritian union with access to worksites and hostels, and—besides the QIMA audit commissioned by Woolworths South Africa, which found that the quality of the rice being fed to workers was subpar—commit to publishing the findings of all audits and corrective action plans. In follow-up interviews, only one Firemount worker said living conditions had improved. Food quality across the facilities, meanwhile, has waxed and waned, if mostly waned.
“Our No. 1 problem is the food,” said “Syed,” a Bangladesh national who signed a three-year contract with Firemount and has frequently gone hungry. “The condition of food at this factory is so poor that it is beyond imagination.”
Worse, he said, is the lack of recourse. “There is no one to talk to. There is no representative whom we can speak to,” he said. “Many of us have spoken about it. And those who spoke about it, all got [sent home]…if anyone tries to complain about the food, the owner himself says, ‘Either eat or go back to Bangladesh. Go back to India.”
Syed’s story parallels Abdul and Ahmed’s: He paid $3,500 to an agent in recruitment fees, forcing him to borrow money. The same agent had promised him a monthly salary of $470 to $580 but the contract, which he couldn’t read because it was in English, showed $128. And the threat of being sent home extended beyond complaints about food, Syed said. Management would do the same for anyone who made production mistakes, fell ill, tried to form a union or spoke to auditors.
He said that the factory concealed things from auditors in other ways, such as making sure that the personal fans workers bought to improve the ventilation in their dorm rooms were hidden during inspections of their living quarters.
After several years at Firemount, Syed is going home. The food was the last straw.
“The food is so bad, I would have never come,” he said. “I would rather starve in Bangladesh.”