Levi’s Turkish Supplier Behind Worst Union-Busting Case in Years, Labor Group Says

Jasmin Malik Chua
·10 min read

If there is one “top-line point” in the Worker Rights Consortium’s (WRC) latest factory investigation, it’s that brand labor standards are meaningless if they’re not enforced, said Scott Nova, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit’s executive director.

“And this is a glaring example of non-enforcement,” he said.

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Nova was referring to the long-anticipated results of the WRC’s investigation into allegations of severe repression of workers’ freedom of association, including verbal and physical intimidation, union-busting, mass firings and wage and severance theft, at the Şanlıurfa Province location of Özak Tekstil, one of Turkey’s largest apparel manufacturers. Levi Strauss & Co. is the sole buyer at the plant, though other Özak Tekstil outposts also supply jeans to nameplates such as Hugo Boss and Zara owner Inditex. By dismissing most of the nearly 500 workers who had protested for months over what they say is the right to choose a union other than the factory’s established one, the WRC says that Özak Tekstil breached not only Turkish law and international labor mores, but also Levi’s code of conduct.

Levi’s has pushed back at the WRC’s report, which was published Friday, saying that it “contains several mischaracterizations and omits a number of relevant details.” It said that it has a longstanding commitment to supporting safe, productive workplaces and that it takes any allegations of attempts to undermine freedom of association “extremely seriously.”

But what happened in Urfa is the worst case of union-busting he has seen in years, Nova said. In December, following the layoffs, Levi’s wrote to Özak Tekstil stating that the firings were a zero-tolerance violation of its standards and that it would take “appropriate next steps to uphold workers’ rights” if the workers weren’t reinstated without retaliation, the report noted. (The Red Tab purveyor told the Clean Clothes Campaign, the garment industry’s largest consortium of trade union and labor groups, the same thing, the latter said.) The following month, Levi’s informed the WRC that it would be ending its relationship with Özak Tekstil, which confirmed to the nonprofit that it received a formal letter of termination in February.

The situation took a turn in April, the report said, when Levi’s informed the WRC that it would continue to conduct business with the Urfa factory without requiring Özak Tekstil to rehire the workers. Levi’s told Rivet that month that it would be working with the plant on a “conditional basis,” one that was dependent on the manufacturer’s fulfillment of a remediation plan that included fixing oppressive working hours, improving health and safety and addressing the routine verbal onslaughts known as mobbing. Those were the same issues that striking workers claimed that Öz İplik-İş, the incumbent union, had failed to protect them against, causing them to decamp for the less established Birtek-Sen.

Neither Öz İplik-İş nor Özak Tekstil were able to immediately return requests for comment because of the Turkish holiday on Friday.

It was the wave of “threats, harassment and pressure” that workers said ensued after they “exercised their right” to choose an alternative to what they characterized as a “yellow union”—meaning a worker’s organization that is heavily or unduly influenced by an employer instead of representing the genuine interests of its members—that resulted in the 80-day face-off against factory management and law enforcement that began in the final weeks of November. “If you don’t leave Birtek-Sen, I’m going to break your head,” one worker said a factory manager told him. “If you change unions, we’ll fire you without giving you your severance,” another was reportedly intimidated. Özak Tekstil insisted to the WRC that its management made no such explicit threats of firing or violence.

“The workers at Özak Teksil have suffered a lot for simply exercising their right to choose a union,” Birtek-Sen said in a statement, which it also published on X. “They have been sacked en masse, subjected to illegal attacks, bans and mass arrests by the governorate and the police. They have been blacklisted and condemned to starvation and social death. However, with this report of the WRC, it has once again become clear that their demands and actions are justified and legitimate, that their rights have been usurped and that the Özak boss and Levi’s are responsible for these crimes against the workers and for these terrible violations of their rights.”

To stay or to go?

That Öz İplik-İş is being framed as a yellow union is something that IndustriALL Global Union, a global union federation that represents more than 50 million working people in over 140 countries, takes issue with. Öz İplik-İş is an IndustriALL affiliate that has inked collective bargaining agreements on behalf of its members with Özak Tekstil—a rarity in a nation that the International Trade Union Confederation consistently ranks among the 10 worst countries for working people because of crackdowns on civil liberties, including union activity.

Atle Høie, IndustriALL’s general secretary, said that it is “more than probable” that global standards, as well as Levi’s code of conduct, have been violated, based on the report, but that it supports a “process and procedure” before a brand disengages, as it does in initiatives such as the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry and the global framework agreements it has signed with the likes of H&M Group and Inditex. In short, in IndustriALL’s view, Levi’s did the right thing.

“When there are violations, they should be dealt with in a process. Brands shouldn’t cut and run,” Høie said. “The only long-term solution is a trade union that has the legal right to sign a collective agreement, like our affiliate Öz-İplik İş.”

Levi’s said that the preservation of the Urfa facility’s remaining 400 jobs was one of the drivers behind its decision to keep working with Özak Tekstil, and that it had been in frequent contact with factory management to “firmly express” its support for the lawful expression of workers’ voices and the right to freedom of association.

“After several months of engaging to find solutions and wanting to ensure there is no further job loss, we decided to continue working with Özak on a conditional basis that depends on management’s fulfillment of a detailed remediation plan,” a spokesperson said. “We reduced our production orders to align with the facility’s capacity and are conducting regular visits to the facility to ensure compliance with the remediation plan.”

The blue jean maker said that it remains committed to ensuring that Özak Tekstil upholds the rights and benefits of its employees per local laws and its code of conduct. Fulya Pinar Özcan, head of international relations and sustainability at Öz İplik-İş, previously told Rivet that the union has worked to address feedback from the Urfa factory’s remaining employees, including electing new worker representatives. She said there would be better representation and more accountability. A Levi’s exit would have meant the end of the Urfa plant, Özcan had said.

Even so, Nova called Levi’s desire to protect jobs “obviously disingenuous” because it didn’t protect the jobs of the hundreds of workers who had already been discharged. Brands like Levi’s also regularly exit factories, which can result in job loss, whenever they find a cheaper place to produce, he said.

“They’re perfectly willing to do that when the reason is to increase their profit margin,” Nova said. “Only when protecting the rights of workers requires them to hold a supplier accountable, do brands suddenly have an attack of conscience about unemployment in their supply chains.”

Neither can there be meaningful corrective action in a factory that has “destroyed” a union—one that most workers chose to join—by firing those same workers unless they are re-employed, he added. By December, 78 percent of the Özak Tekstil workforce in Urfa had joined Birtek-Sen.

“Otherwise, every worker employed by Özak now and in the future will know that the price of joining an independent union that is not favored by management is dismissal and the destruction of your livelihood,” he said. “No one can exercise their associational rights under those conditions. Until the firings are reversed, there cannot be remediation. Pretending this all didn’t happen and having some training on freedom association is meaningless. That is not remediation, it is a fig leaf.”

Birtek-Sen’s legitimacy has come under question because Turkish law requires unions to meet certain membership thresholds—say, representing 1 percent of workers in the relevant industry—before they are vested with the authority to negotiate. But while employers are prohibited from covering the same group of employees with multiple collective bargaining agreements, Nova said, nothing is stopping multiple unions from co-existing in the same workplace or raising labor concerns with factory management.

Both Özak Tekstil and Öz-İplik İş have claimed that the workers were fired not because they were protesting but because they were missing work. Nova said this was false because people can’t strike without being absent and Özak Tekstil sent letters to workers saying they would be fired if they continued striking. And though Özak Tekstil has pointed to a Ministry of Labour investigation endorsing the mass dismissals as proof that its actions were by the book, the WRC called it “one-sided” and “flawed,” not least because nearly everyone it interviewed was an Öz-İplik İş member.

The report said that even after axing the protestors, Özak Tekstil continued to retaliate against its former workers by illegally withholding statutory severance compensation payments and entering “falsely disparaging information” about them into public agency records. The supplier also used this denial of severance, which the WRC deems wage theft, and blacklisting to pressure the fired workers into coercive “settlements” in which they agreed to relinquish the right to reinstatement and back pay, it said.

Last month, German labor organization Internationaler Gewerkschaftlicher Arbeitskreis Köln filed a complaint on behalf of Birtek-Sen to accuse Levi’s, Hugo Boss, and Inditex of reneging on their human rights obligations under the German supply chain due diligence law. It is currently under consideration, the Clean Clothes Campaign said.

Nova said he hopes the report will spur Levi’s to take a different tack because its actions demonstrate not only a “fundamental lack of commitment” to protecting associational rights in its supply chain but they also send a message to suppliers that brands won’t fully punish even the worst abuses in “this category of labor rights.”

“If Levi’s had been serious about enforcing its standards, it wouldn’t be dropping them now,” he said. “They are the sole buyer. They have enormous leverage. They could exercise it tomorrow. They could compel Özak to offer reinstatement. They could have real remediation of these egregious abuses. They could compel Özak to sit down and talk with the independent union that [most] of the workforce, even in the face of management threats, chose to join.”