A campaign called ‘Fight the Heist’ has been created by worker unions in six South and Southeast Asian countries, which claims fashion brands are profiting from wage theft during Covid and are eager to stop it.
These workers’ unions include the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA) and Global Labor Justice-International Labor Rights Forum (GLT-ILRF). The campaign has unions from countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
The AFWA states, “Asian unions and allies have launched this campaign to stop Nike, Levi’s and VF Corp from funneling stolen pandemic wages toward buybacks that enriched owners at Wall Street.”
It also added that the movement wants the big fashion companies and brands to:
- Sit down with garment workers and their unions for a systematic investigation of Covid wage claims, including specific impacts on women workers.
- Stop billionaire payouts from dividends and stock buybacks until all garment workers are repaid their lost wages.
- Transform their global supply chains including providing living wages for all workers.
The campaign follows a report named ‘Big Fashion Investors Cash In on Wage Theft’ published by both the AFWA and GLT-ILRF and the allegations contained within that report.
Articles published by the Wall Street Journal are referred to in the report which alleges that fashion giants based in the US like Nike, have not compensated garment workers, who during the Covid perios lost their ‘paycheck en masse’ and suggests that the workers were laid of in their ‘hundreds of thousands’ from their factories.
The AFWA and GLT-ILRF said, “This was wage theft at an unprecedented scale, from illegal layoffs and terminations to arbitrary pay cuts, unpaid wages for hours worked, and gender discrimination.”
“Big fashion companies, including Nike, triggered this crisis when they cancelled or drastically reduced orders en masse in response to economic uncertainty during the initial months of the Covid pandemic” they further added.
International coordinator of AFWA, Anannya Bhattacharjee said that it was found, after their organisation surveyed 2,000+ garment workers in 189 factories across six countries, garment workers lost around three months’ worth of pay in 2020.
She further explained the ‘Fight the Heist’ campaign demands a systematic investigation of Covid wage claims by having brands and garment workers, with their unions, sit down and develop systems to ensure something like this is not repeated.
Bharat Tex Special Report 2026 
