Two Indonesian factories, where thousands of women have for years stitched licensed college apparel for Fanatics and Nike under a cloud of menace and fear, have signed a new binding agreement to combat gender-based violence and harassment.
The Central Java Agreement for Gender Justice, whose negotiation was supported by the labor watchdogs Worker Rights Consortium, the Asia Floor Wage Alliance and Global Labor Justice, follows the mold of enforceable pacts such as the Lesotho Agreement to End Gender-Based Violence and Harassment and the Dindigul Agreement to Eliminate Gender-Based Violence and Harassment. It notches another win for mandatory worker-led approaches that tackle conduct forbidden by buyer codes but are easily missed by audits and other voluntary box-checking exercises.
For the 6,250 women who stitch clothing at PT Batang Apparel Indonesia and PT Semarang Garment Indonesia, of late owned by Korean multinational firm Ontide but previously established by Kukdong Corporation, the change could not be more welcome. Their male overseers, they said, openly subjected them to leers and taunts. They were regularly groped, pressured to be girlfriends or “second wives” and exposed to crude speculation about their bodies and sex lives. When one of them asked a supervisor why he was repeatedly touching her thighs and buttocks during the day and then ringing her up at all hours of the night, he responded with a testy “That is up to me!”
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The women also faced gendered verbal attacks from their bosses if they couldn’t meet quotas or whose performances were otherwise deemed unsatisfactory. Frequent epithets included “stupid,” “fat,” “crazy,” and “dog.” Some workers said they were made to kiss one particular supervisor’s hand each day before taking up their positions on the production floor. To avoid being falsely targeted for disciplinary action, they were forced to pool money for expensive gifts, including a cellphone and a gold ring, or extend “loans” that would never be repaid.
But even the men who weren’t in obvious positions of power abused what leverage they wielded. Mechanics would decide when and if a sewing operator’s malfunctioning machine would get repaired, perhaps trading a timely response that wouldn’t result in lost income or additional abuse for cigarettes, food or sexual favors. A woman said that when she asked a mechanic to fix her machine, he told her that her line was “full of old women only; no one here is beautiful. If there was anyone beautiful here, the machine would be repaired immediately.” Workers who complained said they were ignored or threatened with dismissal.
An endemic problem
That the state of affairs described could easily be transposed to any factory in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Turkey, Brazil or Haiti underscores the depth to which gender-based sexual violence and harassment, or GBVH, is entrenched in the garment production system, where many of the lowest-status employees are young women and managers and supervisors are typically older males. Women, for instance, account for nearly 90 percent of PT Batang and PT Semarang’s workforce.
“GBVH is endemic in this industry because of gendered supply chains as a cost-cutting measure,” said J.J. Rosenbaum, executive director at GLJ, which like WRC is based in Washington, D.C. She noted that the International Labour Organization’s Convention 190, colloquially known as the violence and harassment convention, is now in its fifth year. “There’s been a lot of activity around that, with an emphasis toward beyond ratification,” she added.
The numbers show why doing so matters. A 2021 assessment by WRC and two local partners—the Sedane Labour Resource Centre, which also goes by LIPS, and Serikat Pekerja Nasional, the union known as SPN—found that more than 80 percent of Indonesian garment workers said they experienced verbal abuse that was frequently gendered. Nearly half also reported facing inappropriate sexual contact and other physical violations.
It was also WRC that initiated an investigation into PT Batang and PT Semarang at the behest of unions representing the workers, including SPN and Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Seluruh Indonesia. In 2022, it brought its findings to Fanatics, which also communicated on behalf of Nike because it sources the majority of fan-facing apparel for many of the latter’s university partners, including Michigan State University and the University of Texas at Austin. Its audits hadn’t picked up any issues, but Fanatics agreed to push Ontide to take remedial action, including dismissing the worst perpetrators of GBVH and rehiring the women who had resigned to escape the abuse. It worked.
“Upon learning of these troubling allegations, we moved quickly to terminate or otherwise discipline numerous individuals found to be involved in inappropriate behavior,” John Yoon, sustainability director of Ontide, wrote in an email. ”We welcome the continued engagement with union leadership, the WRC, our buyers and other stakeholders….to provide one of the safest workplaces in the country for female garment workers.”
Industry precedents
Indeed, the women said they felt less vulnerable after the firings, but they and their unions also wanted a more permanent solution. They looked at the Lesotho Agreement, which Levi Strauss & Co., The Children’s Place and Wrangler owner Kontoor Brands signed with the WRC and Nien Hsing Textile Co. in 2019 after the southern African manufacturer’s managers were found demanding sexual favors from workers in exchange for keeping their jobs or getting promoted.
They also referred to the Dindigul Agreement, forged in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu in 2022 following the death of 20-year-old Jeyasre Kathiravel, a garment worker at Natchi Apparel, who was brutally raped and murdered by her supervisor. H&M Group was the first to heed the call of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Workers Union, AFWA and GLJ, then Calvin Klein owner PVH Corp. and Gap Inc.
Though the two agreements differ in details, they share the same broad strokes regarding union and worker oversight, deploying training for workers, supervisors and managers; a peer education program; multi-channel grievance mechanisms; shop floor monitors to identify and flag issues on the production line; and fair and prompt remediation of complaints.
The negotiations were “protracted but ultimately successful,” WRC wrote in a memo seen by Sourcing Journal before its publication. Signed in July 2024 by Ontide, WRC, AFWA, GLJ and the unions—and enforced through the binding commitments that Fanatics and Nike have made to WRC-affiliated universities through licensing contracts—the Central Java Agreement draws from the best practices of those that preceded it, including what AFWA calls its “Safe Circles” approach to fighting GBVH.
As part of the deal, the factories created GBVH-specific labor-management committees to oversee both of their programs on a daily basis, instituted a so-called global coordination dialogue to ensure effective collaboration among all stakeholders—buyers included—and defined strong protections for whistleblowers and freedom of association.
The agreement also name-checks the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Garment and Textile Industry, formerly known as the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, which not only brought about sweeping safety improvements across 1,600 factories in and around Dhaka and is now being implemented in Pakistan but it also “demonstrated the effectiveness of such enforceable agreements and surfaced key learnings for the subsequent agreements,” the memo said.
Fanatics has committed to enforce Ontide’s compliance. It’s this and Fanatics and Nike’s ongoing backing that WRC says will be crucial to preventing a recurrence of abuses and to safeguard women workers at the factories in the short and long term.
“As part of our commitment to ensure that the workers who manufacture Fanatics’ products worldwide are treated fairly and respectfully, we are pleased to have had the opportunity to support the negotiation and implementation of the Central Java Gender Justice Agreement between our supplier Ontide, Indonesian unions, the Worker Rights Consortium, Asia Floor Wage Alliance and Global Labor Justice,” Chris Fox, chief sustainability officer of Fanatics, said in a statement. “The comprehensive program created by this agreement is creating a safer and more secure workplace for all workers at these factories.”
Nike did not respond to a request for comment. The Just Do It firm is the target of an upcoming AFWA and GLJ-organized public photo petition from 1,000 of its Asian garment workers who are demanding living wages and human rights protections after experiencing severe wage losses during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A ‘pent-up demand’
Complaints from women are still coming in from both PT Batang and PT Semarang, even after the first remediation, said Jessica Champagne, deputy director for strategy and field operations at WRC, signaling the “pent-up demand” for a broader solution that also complements existing union collective bargaining agreements. “The fact that women are coming forward and actually being listened to is really exciting,” she said.
The question now, is how to get more brands to follow Fanatics’ lead. The brand-university licensing relationship was an important lever to pull because of the role student activism plays in battling sweatshops, which is why WRC didn’t contact Outerstuff and other non-collegiate buyers during the two factories’ remediation process. Ontide also turned out to be more amenable to improving conditions than Kukdong Corporation was.
Now, however, organizations are reaching out to urge other brands’ support to help scale similar agreements, particularly as due diligence legislation comes to bear. It was due to the Dindigul Agreement that Natchi Apparel, facing allegations of forced labor, was able to get a Withhold Release Order from U.S. Customs and Border Protection lifted in 2022. With the gutting of U.S. foreign aid to programs that uphold garment workers’ rights, leaving some of their futures in doubt, the Central Java Agreement also provides an example of how private arrangements can hold brands accountable. The hitch is that brands will have to shift from the voluntary standards to which they’re used and have so far considered adequate.
“This is just yet another reason why workers themselves need the tools in their hands and that are consistently available across all kinds of administrations to change their workplaces, in Indonesia and in the United States and in Europe and all around the world, today, tomorrow and yesterday,” Rosenbaum said.
“I think this is going to call the question very sharply for brands, are they serious about change?” she added. “In the context of labor rights, voluntary codes without worker leadership…that’s not going to work. We’ve got a model. It works in very different contexts. It solves their risk assessment around forced labor. Now the question is, ‘Are you looking for window dressing or are you looking for something real?’”
And not only in Central Java or even the rest of the country, said Wiranta Ginting, deputy international coordinator at AFWA, who sees PT Batang and PT Semarang as pilot cases—the first in Southeast Asia—that could yield more. There can be a tendency for brands, facing negative publicity, to cut and run from badly behaving suppliers, which can leave everyone involved worse off. He wants them to know there’s a better, more effective way that allows unions and employers to redistribute power and resources.
“We need to bring these agreements to other countries, not only Indonesia,” Ginting said. “We see that the enforceable brand agreement is a way to have better working conditions, to intervene directly and to build power for the unions at the plant level.”