Where is gildan shirts made

Life is harder for the family since Odinel was dismissed from his job making Gildan clothes. Benoit Aquin. Charlotin Odinel lives in the Village de Dieu, Bicentenaire shantytown in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where his home is a cinder-block shack consisting of two tiny windowless rooms—no running water—that he shares with his wife and three children.

To get there, you navigate a warren of makeshift homes, stepping over garbage and mud puddles. Nearby, a canal filled with brackish black water is rimmed by heaps of rotting waste where dogs and pigs run wild and mosquitoes, carrying the threat of malaria and dengue fever, are omnipresent. Says Odinel: "As a human, this is not a good place to live.

Odinel, a slight year-old with a touch of facial hair, has been unemployed since he lost his job last summer at the nearby Premium apparel factory, which makes clothing for Gildan Activewear Inc. He'd spent four years there inspecting T-shirts for defects. Never given a reason for his dismissal, Odinel believes it was due to his union activism.

Odinel found his job stressful. Employing more than 1, workers, the sweltering Premium plant maintained an intense pace of production. Odinel was a cog in Gildan's vast production network, which stretches from Central America and the Caribbean Basin to Bangladesh, employing about 41, people and producing apparel that is sold in more than 30 countries. While the lives of workers like Odinel are grim, Gildan is a success story. The company is gaining market share, having more than doubled sales since Once merely a manufacturer of "blank" T-shirts and sweatshirts that others put their logos on, Gildan later added fleece, sports shirts, underwear and socks.

Lately, it has been stepping up the marketing of its own label, even airing an ad during the Super Bowl. Analysts are enthusiastic. When it's doing so well, does Gildan need to play hardball with workers in impoverished countries?

If Odinel was truly fired for associating with a union—and it's a claim echoed by many others who worked at plants making Gildan clothes—it flies in the face of Gildan's robust corporate social responsibility program and internal code of conduct. Iliopoulos says he's surprised to hear there are reports of workers being fired for union activity. Such information should be brought to the company's attention, he adds, "and we will deal with it proactively.

Gildan was founded in in a small shop in Montreal by brothers Glenn and Greg Chamandy, whose family has deep roots in the city's garment trade. They bought a knitting mill to supply fabric for their childwear business, Harley Inc. Gildan later changed its focus to selling cotton T-shirts to wholesalers, which resold them to distributors and Canadian and American screen-printers. The brothers ran the company together until Greg left in CEO Glenn Chamandy declined to be interviewed; the company would not permit a visit to any of its factories.

As it turned out, making inexpensive clothes in Canada was a dicey proposition. Once heavily unionized and protected by tariffs, the country's apparel manufacturing sector was levelled by trade liberalization and globalization—all quotas on apparel were lifted by The reason was simple: the cost of labour.

Jobs were moving abroad. The Chamandys soon realized staying in business meant following their competitors overseas. Finding cheaper labour was not, however, the only method Gildan used to cut costs—it also chopped its tax bill.

In , the company opened a subsidiary in Barbados to manage marketing and sales. Barbados has a treaty with Canada that permits multinationals to repatriate profits they earn abroad without being taxed here.

The result: Gildan no longer pays much corporate income tax in Canada. If one includes recoveries Gildan received stemming from acquisitions and restructurings, it paid no corporate income tax at all from to You benefit from everything. And after you've established all of this, then you move out. Nevertheless, as McGill tax law professor Allison Christians observes, Gildan is simply taking advantage of what the Canadian government has wrought.

The tax system is built to send manufacturing offshore. Just of its employees work in Canada, at the company's Montreal head office. The search for cheap, pliable labour sent major North American and European clothing manufacturers and retailers to Asia—first to low-wage countries like Korea and China, and then, as costs rose, to nations like Cambodia and Bangladesh, where the infamous collapse of Rana Plaza in Dhaka took the lives of more than 1, workers in Gildan has demonstrated the same restlessness, but has focused instead on the Caribbean Basin.

By , Gildan had shuttered all of its plants in North America and relocated production to Honduras, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic and Haiti it also produces clothing in Bangladesh. The company settled on Honduras as its main base of production, opening its first plant there in Today Gildan employs 26, people at half a dozen facilities in the country, making textiles, socks, underwear and activewear.

Complaints about labour conditions have followed the company since the late s. To critics, there's a consistent pattern of foot-dragging and half-measures in Gildan's responses.

Currently the third-largest exporter of apparel and textiles to the U. It has the highest murder rate in the world, and is the second-poorest country in Central America. And while unions are legal, trade unionists are regularly murdered: 31 have been assassinated and injured in attacks since , according to the AFL-CIO. Gildan's Iliopoulos says that "we pay wages that are significantly above the industry minimum wage. Iliopoulos won't address whether Gildan pays a living wage, saying it is a "complex issue," with the level varying from country to country, and from NGO to NGO.

It was in Honduras that Gildan had its first major run-in with non-governmental organizations over pay, working conditions and the treatment of its workforce. Before MSN could complete its report, however, things turned nasty.

With this acquisition, the Company controls all aspects of its manufacturing process after yarn-spinning. At this point, Gildan is focusing on expanding in the U. Gildan also launches its proprietary Biotop system, which treats its wastewater completely naturally using sunlight, gravity and bacteria to return clean water to the environment. Gildan becomes the number one overall t-shirt company in the U.

Based on the S. In February, Gildan announces the conversion of class B multiple voting shares, effective March 1st, into class A subordinate voting shares of the Company on a one-for-one basis without any conversion premium. Gildan obtains the Oeko-Tex Certification, the most internationally recognized eco-label designation in the textiles supply chain.

Gildan enters the Australian market for imprinted activewear and opens its first sewing facility in Nicaragua. Gildan opens a new fully-integrated facility in the Dominican Republic with knitting, dyeing and cutting operations. The Company also announces a second joint-venture yarn-spinning facility with Frontier Spinning in Clarkton, North Carolina.

A comprehensive labour practice code that integrates the Gildan, FLA and WRAP codes of conduct, as well as incorporates current best practices, is developed and implemented.

Gildan starts production in the Dominican Republic and acquires Kentucky Derby Hosiery to enter the retail channel as a full-line supplier of socks, underwear and activewear. The Company continues the expansion of its manufacturing footprint through two acquisitions of sock manufacturers and the construction of a sock manufacturing facility in Honduras. Gildan made it clear from the time it took over American Apparel that its interest was primarily about folding it into its own large wholesaling business.

Gildan wanted the American Apparel brand, too. Though it resembles less and less the label once beloved by urban millennials, who went to it for items such as tube socks, t-shirts, and body suits. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz.