At this Classic factory--there are six factories in the Al-Hassan industrial zone--there are 4,500 workers, all of them guest workers from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal. With regard to production, 60% is for Walmart. Hanes is another big producer. Now, Walmart is the biggest retailer in the world, and Hanes is the most recognized label in the United States.
The workers in these factories are working from 7:30 in the morning until 10 or 10:30 at night--14 to 15 hours a day--Saturday through Wednesday. On Thursday, they work this incredible shift of 24 and a half hours. They start at 7:30 in the morning on Thursday and work through the night until 8 a.m. on Friday morning--24 and a half hours. They are at the factory for 99 and a half hours a week. The workers are being cheated out of at least 40% of their wages. For the official 92-hour workweek, they should be earning about $78; instead, they are being paid $40 to $45.
The workers who don't meet their mandatory production goal are slapped and beaten. As a matter of fact, they deport the workers who don't reach their goal.
Right now, today, 300 Sri Lankan women in this factory have fallen behind their production goal for the last month. Management has stripped them of their passports--again, this is human trafficking--and they are about to be deported for not reaching their goals. As I said earlier, they are also beaten if they don't reach their goals. Right now, we estimate that in this factory there are about 2,000 workers who have been stripped of their passports. This is going on in broad daylight.
These workers have been trafficked to Jordan and are being held under miserable conditions. Their dormitories are very primitive and dirty, and they are infested with bedbugs. The workers are working 14 and a half or 15 hours a day and they can't sleep at night because they are tortured by these bugs. We have pictures of this that we have sent to scientists at the University of Ohio, who have confirmed that these bedbugs were gorging themselves on the workers' blood.
The women are locked in. They have no freedom of movement. They are locked in their dormitory compound after their work. They are prohibited from leaving. Even on Friday, the Muslim holiday, they cannot go out to shop.
The Jordanian ministry of labour has put Classic on their golden list of companies, meaning that it is among the best factories in the country and that it respects all the local and international labour laws. Of course, that is not at all true. When the workers signed their three-year contract to go to Jordan, they were told they'd get free food, free health care, free housing--all of it decent. That is not true. They charge the workers $28.20 per month for food. The workers are paid late. They have no health care. The workers told us at our discussions yesterday that they have absolutely zero confidence in the ministry of labour.
We've seen that with a Canadian apparel company, the Nygard company. It was producing at a factory called IBG. In April, when we investigated that factory, 1,200 workers had been stripped of their passports. They were working from 7 in the morning until 11 at night: 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. For the 110 hours of time they were at the factory, they were paid less than half of the minimum wage: about 34ยข. They faced sexual harassment, filthy dormitories, and bedbugs--the whole works.
We think the ministry of labour has not been able to monitor these factories. The fact that the workers are guest workers makes them very easy to exploit. They don't know the Arabic language. Their passports are frequently taken away.
I think Jordan has an enormous distance to go in order to clean up Jordan so that free trade agreements can go forward.
We know that someone from the U.S. Trade Representative's office is heading to Jordan this week. We keep engaged with the Jordanian government, but at this point it has been a massive failure as far as labour rights go.