The True Price of Sportswear
Workers at an athletic apparel factory in Lesotho who make clothes for Reebok, The Greg Norman Collection, and others allege assault, humiliation, intimidation, and bullying.
AUGUST 4, 2024
Mathabo shuffled toward the front of the cavernous factory. It was 5 p.m., and she had just clocked out of her job in quality control for Precious Garments, a factory in Maseru, Lesotho, that makes athletic apparel for Reebok and other international brands.
As she stood in line, waiting to reach the exit, her body tensed involuntarily.
At the door, Mathabo wordlessly hiked her shirt up and lowered her pants. Then she closed her eyes as a supervisor stuck her hand inside her underwear and between her legs. Mathabo, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity, and the other workers were told this was to prevent theft, to make sure nothing had been tucked under their waistbands or concealed in their undergarments. But it felt personal. Sometimes, the supervisors who strip-searched the workers wrinkled their noses as they patted them down, as though recoiling at the person’s smell. Some mocked their torn underwear and stretched-out bras.
“It’s not a good experience at all,” she said.
Mathabo, a shy woman in her early 40s, despised this near-daily ritual but felt she had no choice. She had a ninth-grade education, and she had resigned herself to the fact that she needed the job inspecting running shorts for loose threads more than she needed her dignity. In the winter, sometimes, it was cold enough inside to see her own breath. But her monthly salary of $140 supported four people. When the search was over, she fumbled with her clothes and lurched forward into the cold night, knowing the next day would be the same.
In total, 13 current or recent employees told The Dial that they were frequent victims of these demeaning strip searches at Precious Garments in the last year.
“When you wake up in the morning and know you’re going to [Precious Garments], you don’t want to wake up,” said someone worked at the factory until April 2023 and asserts that she was also regularly strip searched. “But for financial reasons, you have to do it.”
It wasn’t just the strip searches that workers said made Precious Garments a miserable place to work. In total, 17 current or recent Precious Garments employees told The Dial that they endured regular humiliation, bullying, and intimidation at the factory. These employees described working under supervisors who regularly hit them and called them demeaning names. Several were forced to skip lunch breaks to hit production targets, and multiple women said they bled through their clothes during their periods because there wasn’t time to use the bathroom.
Globally, the fact that audits often fail to protect garment workers is an open secret.
In a written statement, Precious Garments said that “none of our workers” had ever complained about being strip searched either “by themselves or through their unions.” They also denied that workers are intimidated or overworked and said the company does “not tolerate” verbal or physical abuse in the factory. Employees “know their rights,” the factory wrote, and have a clear internal grievance procedure to raise any issues around their working conditions. Precious Garment’s compliance manager stated that she had “never heard any allegations” of sexual harassment or assault.
The alleged abuse occurred even as the factory was being regularly audited for compliance with labor codes of conduct set by the international brands whose clothing is made there, including Reebok and golf wear brand The Greg Norman Collection. (Export data shows that products from the factory have recently been shipped to High Life LLC, which distributes Reebok sportswear in the US, and Tharanco Lifestyles, which manufactures the clothing line bearing former pro-golfer Greg Norman’s name. Workers and officials from National Clothing Textile and Allied Workers Union (NACTWU), a trade union, confirmed that the two brands regularly source from Precious Garments; the factory’s management also wrote in an email that Reebok is one of their “buyers.”)
When asked how factory inspections were conducted, ten people currently or recently employed by Precious Garments told The Dial they had been told to lie or omit information about their working conditions when auditors visited. Their accounts were broadly consistent. All ten described either being coached or watching others be coached before speaking to inspectors. Several said they had been told either that they would lose their job if they spoke negatively about working conditions, or that flagging problems could cause the factory to close. “Many people are afraid to lose their jobs,” one worker said. “They have tried to say [to auditors] what they are experiencing. But then they were threatened that the orders are not coming in because of what they said.”
Factory management acknowledged that manipulation of audits was previously an issue at Precious Garments but said it “was sorted out a long time ago.”
Many workers also expressed concern about the potential consequences of speaking to journalists about their experience — and it appears they had good reason to be worried.
After The Dial approached Precious Garments’ management for comment, one factory manager opened a civil case of defamation against a worker and a trade union official who spoke to The Dial about poor working conditions. The manager claimed he was “damaged in his good name and character” by the accusations and demanded relief of about $55,000, or approximately 32 years of a Precious Garments worker’s salary. The case is pending.
Reebok and its parent company, Authentic Brands, did not respond to multiple requests for comment by email, phone and text message between February and June. Tharanco Lifestyles did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. The Greg Norman Company declined to comment on specific allegations raised by The Dial. A representative of the company stated in an email that The Greg Norman Collection is a “licensee business” that “Mr. Norman does not control.”
“As such, he has no involvement or knowledge of the manufacturing process of the products you referenced,” the representative wrote.
Globally, the fact that audits often fail to protect garment workers is an open secret. After all, auditors are hired by brands and factories, both of whom want to keep production humming. That doesn’t incentivize them to find or report big problems, said Sarosh Kuruvilla, a supply chain expert at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. “So as a result, auditing becomes a ‘check the box’ exercise.”
The inspections they order aren’t complex detective work. Auditors typically sweep through a factory in a few days, looking at building conditions, scrutinizing pay stubs, and interviewing a few dozen workers — often with their bosses watching.
The problem is particularly worrying in Lesotho, given it has been held up as a model for how to better protect workers. In 2019, a sexual abuse scandal led to reforms at several of the country’s denim factories. But the new measures didn’t reach all the country’s garment workers. In dozens of factories in Lesotho — including Precious Garments — workers still say they have nowhere to turn.
The limits of these reforms showcase the difficulty of reforming sweatshop work, which often happens as a result of consumer pressure and brand goodwill rather than enforceable regulation.
“This is the one … problem that workers are facing in many of the factories This pressure is not exceptional,” said Sam Mokhele, the secretary-general of NACTWU, one of the country’s major unions for garment workers. Workers “are always advised not to raise such issues because if they do that, they are putting the company at risk of losing their orders.”
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The drive for cheap labor, and willful blindness about its hidden costs, has been an enduring theme of globalization. A reckoning came in the late 1990s when consumers in the West learned that Nike and other major clothing brands, including Reebok, were sourcing from factories that employed children, paid unlivable wages, and forced workers to spend as long as 16 hours a day, seven days a week on the job.
The resulting anti-sweatshop movement laid bare something few American consumers knew: that their clothes weren’t being made by the brands whose labels they bore. Instead, those companies subcontracted the work of spinning, cutting, and sewing to an opaque network of factories around the globe. And often, they had no idea what was going on inside them.
In the wake of these revelations, brands started hiring inspectors to visit these factories and report back about working conditions. That way, the brands said, they would know if something was amiss, and they could cut suppliers that abused garment workers out of their supply chains.
It is hardly an airtight system. For one thing, the brands mostly regulate themselves. Their “codes of conduct” are the yardstick that determines what a “good” factory looks like. The inspections they order aren’t complex detective work. Auditors typically sweep through a factory in a few days, looking at building conditions, scrutinizing pay stubs, and interviewing a few dozen workers — often with their bosses watching. (The government of Lesotho does not perform inspections.)
An auditor typically has 600-700 items to check off in an audit, said Kuruvilla, the Cornell supply chain expert. “You can’t be simultaneously trained in human resources and payroll evaluations as well as safety and health,” he said.
Very often, the inspections are scheduled in advance. All of this makes audits easy to manipulate. At Precious Garments, 10 workers told The Dial that they had personally been asked to lie to visiting auditors about their working conditions. “We are threatened not to say things that paint a bad picture of the factory, or else we will lose our jobs and the factory will close,” one worker said.
Perhaps the most glaring flaw in the system is the fact that everyone involved — from the brands to the auditors to factory bosses and workers — has a vested interest in keeping production churning.
If auditors do flag that something is amiss, it is up to the brands to decide to act — or not — on their recommendations. (The exception is when brands are part of certification programs — for instance, “fair trade” — that use a global set of standards. The Dial was unable to confirm whether Authentic Brands or The Greg Norman Collection are currently a part of such programs.) Clothing companies are not required to share the results of audits with their customers or their shareholders. Unsurprisingly, they rarely do.
Perhaps the most glaring flaw in the system is the fact that everyone involved — from the brands to the auditors to factory bosses and workers — has a vested interest in keeping production churning. The auditing industry itself generates over $300 million in revenue annually, a parallel supply chain to the garment industry made up of its own set of major international companies and their local subcontractors. Suppliers manipulate audits “so they will get repeat business from the client,” Kuruvilla said. For them, like everyone else in the industry, factories shutting down is just bad business.
That means auditors often miss — or willfully overlook — the obvious. In June 2012, German auditing behemoth TÜV Rheinland inspected a garment factory in Rana Plaza, an eight-story building in an industrial suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The audit report noted that the building was in sound structural condition. Less than a year later, on April 24, 2013, the building collapsed, crushing to death more than 1,100 people, the vast majority of them garment workers. (TÜV Rheinland stated that claims their audit was “inadequate” were “misleading” because “the examination of construction defects was not the subject of the audits.” In 2018, the Bangladeshi government cleared them of responsibility for the tragedy.)
Accurately documenting sensitive cases of abuse and harassment is even more problematic. In 2019, an auditing firm in Bangladesh conducted a worker sentiment survey in which one third of workers said they had witnessed or experienced sexual harassment. Those numbers didn’t match the firm’s own social audits, which found less than 1 percent of cases of abuse.
"With the lengths of audits that we get, it’s not very easy” to build enough rapport and trust to see gender-based violence, said Nthabeleng Molise, an auditor in Lesotho. Most garment factory audits last only a few days and take place inside the factory gates. Only twice in Molise’s entire career, she said, has a worker told her during an audit that they were being sexually harassed. “You will hear just tiny bits of it. When you try to follow it up, it ends up in the air.”
Lesotho has housed clothing factories since the 1980s, when Taiwanese investors looking to avoid sanctions against apartheid South Africa — but still use its roads and ports — decided to set up shop in the country conveniently located inside of it. The industry’s big break came in the early 2000s, after Lesotho became part of an American trade deal, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), allowing it to export certain products — including clothing — to the U.S. market tax free.
By 2004, Lesotho’s garment factories employed 54,000 people — more than any other sector in the country besides the civil service. Between 80 and 90 percent are women.
Since the COVID19 pandemic, the number of garment jobs has fallen to about 34,000. But although Lesotho remains a tiny player in the global garment industry, it is one of Africa’s largest clothing exporters, producing for international brands like Levi’s, Reebok, and Kate Hudson’s athleisure line Fabletics. Because of the US trade deal, more than 80 percent of all Lesotho’s clothing exports end up in the hands of Americans.
For many women, this work has helped shake themselves loose of long-held social hierarchies in a country where abortion is nearly entirely illegal, and under customary law, first-born girls cannot inherit their parents’ property if they have a brother. As jobs in mining — a primarily male-dominated sector — have dried up, these women have become their families’ primary breadwinners.
For the first time, many women in Lesotho are not beholden to the men in their families for money or protection. Their paychecks bring them power. But this independence is also precarious.
Women in factories like Precious Garments need their jobs to survive. And that frequently means putting up with daily abuse — like supervisors who slap you for a small mistake, or don’t allow you to go to the toilet to change your menstrual pad. Working at Precious Garments “takes your dignity away,” one worker said simply.
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In recent years, the tide seemed ready to turn, a reckoning on the horizon.
Evidence of rampant sexual violence at a group of denim factories in Lesotho, uncovered by the international labor rights watchdog Worker Rights Consortium in 2019, provoked a call for change.
Women working in three factories owned by Taiwanese company Nien Hsing, which produced clothes for brands like Levi’s and Wrangler, were regularly being forced to have sex with their supervisors to keep their jobs, the group’s investigation found. Verbal harassment and groping were rife. (“We strive to ensure a safe and secure workplace for all workers in our factories," Nien Hsing Chairman Richard Chen said in a written statement at the time.)
“At that time, you would pray before you go to work,” said Rorisang Kamoli, who worked in one of those factories. If it wasn’t your supervisor, she said, it was their boss. And everyone knew what was happening.
Still, no audit had ever picked up the issue.
But the report embarrassed major brands and incensed consumers. Local labor activists saw an opportunity to force the companies to take stronger measures to protect workers.
“Brands are so sensitive when it comes to publicity,” said Sam Mokhele, the NACTWU secretary general.
Alongside the factories, trade unions, local women’s rights organizations, and international labor advocates, Levi’s, Kontoor Brands (which runs the jeans labels Wrangler and Lee), and The Children’s Place came up with a new system for reporting and investigating sexual violence in these factories, including sexual harassment training and a call center where workers can report abuse. They agreed to foot the bill for the new program for two years, aided in part by a $1 million grant from USAID, and gave Nien Hsing an ultimatum: they would stop sourcing from their factories if conditions did not improve.
The program — the first in the world to specifically address sexual violence in garment factories in this way, according to campaigners — gives workers a trusted place to report abuse, without fear of risking their job or reputation.
Today, workers at Nien Hsing’s denim factories receive extended trainings on how to recognize sexual violence. At a training The Dial attended in mid-2022, workers studied a display of stock images of hands touching butts, thighs and shoulders. Tlhekefetso ka motabo, read the text included on one image. “Sexual harassment.” Posters displayed around the factories advertise a secure complaint line to report sexual abuse; independent investigators from Workers’ Rights Watch, an NGO formed in 2020 to investigate workers’ complaints, follow up on every claim.
In theory, perpetrators can lose their jobs, and although they rarely do, the threat is enough to deter most would-be offenders, say workers, advocates, and union officials involved in the program. And workers feel heard. The program — the first in the world to specifically address sexual violence in garment factories in this way, according to campaigners — gives workers a trusted place to report abuse, without fear of risking their job or reputation.
And even though the line targets gender-based violence, many noted that general conditions in factories have also improved. The workplace has become more respectful, more professional, and less violent, said Itumeleng Moerane, a former manager of the complaint line, which is run by Workers’ Rights Watch. Everyone in the factories knows “people are watching, and then there’s fear.”
In factories that aren’t part of the program, however, there is still fear among workers, who are left to fend for themselves.
When the complaint line first opened, Makatleho Qhola said she spent her days waiting for the phone to ring. Gradually, a few people plucked up the courage. And when their colleagues saw that the cases were taken seriously, the call volume spiked — including calls from workers at other factories like Precious Garments.
The limitation of the service weighs heavily on Qholo, a social worker by training. “It’s all the same issues everywhere,” she said.
For cases that fall outside the complaint line’s scope, the best she can do is refer her callers to a legal aid organization, or the police, and hope that, somehow, they find their way.
$140 a month didn’t go far, but a paycheck of any kind was a ticket to a far bigger, more independent life than their mothers could have imagined.
The program’s main problem is now how to keep going. Two years have come and gone, and the brands have stopped paying for the complaint line and training program. Both are now subsidized by the Solidarity Center, a global labor nonprofit supported by USAID, but future funding is wobbly. Solidarity Center declined to comment on how much funding it is providing.
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Walking out of factory gates on payday, Mathabo, the Precious Garments worker, notices nearby vendors eyeing her hopefully.
“Now the streets are full of people selling things because factory workers have money to buy them,” she said. It makes her feel like a person who matters.
Small stands like these have sprouted up near factories across Maseru, with vendors tempting workers with loose cigarettes and fried dough balls on their breaks, a testament to the garment industry’s ripple effect on the economy.
On the other side of the Precious Garments factory, dozens of shipping containers are stacked like Tetris pieces in an open field, waiting to ship finished orders from the factory and others out to the world.
Many of the workers who talked to The Dial for this piece had been optimistic when they took their jobs at Precious Garments. $140 a month didn’t go far, but a paycheck of any kind was a ticket to a far bigger, more independent life than their mothers could have imagined.
That life is also achingly fragile, dependent on the whims of people halfway around the world.
Among the former Precious Garment employees, several were let go when orders from international brands waned. Others said they had been fired for minor infractions like accidentally dropping union paperwork on the floor.
Trade unions and labor NGOs have been urging Precious Garments and other factories to set up a complaint line and anti-harassment program like the one at Nien Hsing. But the companies are dragging their feet, and advocates say a big part of the problem is that these factories don’t seem to think anyone is truly paying attention to what they do.
Factories also fear they will lose business if they admit to poor working conditions. But advocates say clothing brands have an ethical responsibility not to simply “cut and run” when there are issues with the suppliers they work with. “When a brand simply pulls out … workers lose their jobs,” said Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator for Clean Clothes Campaign, in a statement to The Dial. Instead, brands should “use their influence to convince the factory to end the abuses.”
While some former workers at Precious Garments long to go back, others said they felt relieved to never have to walk through the factory gates again. “Once you are away from that place, you feel your soul is free,” one former employee said.
“I wish the people who buy these clothes can just decide not to buy them,” she added, “because they are being made by people with their hearts broken.”
This reporting was supported by a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation.
✺ Published in “Issue 18: Sports” of The Dial
