UNPAID Zara labourers sew DESPERATE notes on garments

Zara, the illustrious Spanish fashion brand needs absolutely no introduction. A smart amalgamation of the latest fashion trends, silhouettes, good quality and affordability, Zara became a major success and favourite amongst the fashion enthusiasts and celebrities worldwide. Owned by Inditex, the world’s largest apparel retailer; the fast fashion powerhouse has been slapped with copyright infringement cases, accused of stealing designs and plagiarism more than often.

Zara has found itself embroiled in yet another controversy and an extremely embarrassing one this time. According to reports in an international daily, shoppers in Istanbul found desperate notes in their clothing, allegedly sewn on by the workers seeking for help who had not being paid for their labour at the Bravo Tekstil factory in Turkey.

An Inditex spokesperson provided a written statement to a leading website explaining that the company had indeed been manufacturing clothing at Bravo Tekstil, along with other European-based fast fashion labels like Mango and Next. Around 155 laborers worked in the factory. In July 2016, the factory shut down due to the “fraudulent disappearance of the Bravo factory’s owner,” Inditex says. This owner, the company added, took all the money the fashion companies had paid and disappeared without paying the workers, who had already made the clothing.

The spokesperson also mentioned that the parent company had met all of its contractual obligations to Bravo Tekstil. However, the concern isn’t about Inditex meeting all its obligations to the factory but if it had met all of its obligations to the workers, who created those garments which went on to give profits to Zara while they were unpaid and also the association of Inditex with such an alleged unethical factory owner.

Zara is one of the world’s fastest selling high street fashion brand which has around 2,200 stores across 88 countries. Its parent company Inditex in 2016 generated a whopping $27 billion in revenue and $5.8 billion in profits.

After almost over a year of the closure of the factory, the workers took the matters into their own hands by creating a petition on Change.org as they were tired of waiting for this money to materialize. The notes were only found in the Istanbul Zara stores shedding light on the authenticity of this story and suggesting that the workers indeed went to these stores and sewed tags on the garment.

One of the tag’s read, “I made this item you are going to buy but I didn’t get paid for it.”

The petition reads, “For 12 months, we waited for the conclusion of these negotiations with patience and hope. To prevent any disruptions to the negotiations, we endured them in silence. However, after an entire year, the brands declared that they will only pay just over a quarter of our claim. In other words, the brands accepted their liability, but they thought we deserve no more than their scraps.”

The petition has been signed by over 20,000 people from around the world. The workers hold their immediate boss - Bravo Tekstil’s owner for stealing their wages. Incidents and reports like these only make us wonder where all of our money is going and if we should boycott such a brand that ignorantly stamps on the poor’s hard work while they are making all the luxurious profits.