In a factory at the Myanmar border in Thailand, hundreds of Burmese workers made F&F jeans for Tesco. They describe sweatshop conditions, with 99-hour weeks, one day off a month and illegally low pay.
Now Tesco is facing a landmark British lawsuit for alleged negligence, having used the VK Garment (VKG) factory in Mae Sot as a supplier to its Thai business from 2017 until the supermarket sold its operations in Asia in December 2020. The case is being brought by 130 former garment workers at the factory.
Tesco said protecting the rights of everyone in its supply chain was absolutely essential and that had it known of the serious allegations it would have stopped using VKG immediately.
The Guardian spoke to 21 former workers from the factory at their homes in Mae Sot. Here are some of their stories.
The cleaner making £3 a day
Win Win Mya, 53, says she was paid about £3 – less than half the Thai minimum wage – to sweep the factory floor all day. She asked for a pay rise in 2019 but says she was refused. “They said if you want more money you can find other work but we don’t have any other options.”
She was one of 136 workers who lost their jobs in August 2020 after asking to be paid the minimum wage. They say they were given an ultimatum by the factory: apply as new workers and accept things as they were, or leave. When they refused, they were dismissed.
She said being over 50 made it impossible to find another job and she has been unemployed and relying on her children since.
She was among the lowest paid in the factory. Commenting on Tesco’s £2.2bn profits made in the year she lost her job, she said: “They took that profit from us. They already have it but we don’t have anything.”
Fingertip ‘sliced off while making F&F jackets’
Win Soe, 48, is missing the tip of his index finger on his right hand. He says it got jammed in the button machine while making F&F denim jackets in about 2018.
“The machine I used was outdated,” he said. “Sometimes it jammed and I had to push with my leg to make it work.” He said the machine had no safety switch and gestures to show how he put his hand on the buttoning plate while reaching down to try to unjam it.
He said the work was hard and he felt humiliated by being shouted at by supervisors. “They did not respect us and they shouted at us most of the time. We were not happy but I didn’t have any option other than carrying on with my work. I have a family and I had to consider their wellbeing too.”
The worker who found his photo on a blacklist
Thant Sin Aung, 23, says he was 15 when he started working for the factory under different ownership eight years ago. He said the factory arranged for a fake border passport with a fake name and his image and an older date of birth to get around child labour laws.
He says while making F&F clothes he often forgot to eat to try to meet targets and earn more, and became sick, once having to take most of a month off with illness and no pay.
After he and others were dismissed in August 2020, he says he approached a nearby factory, only to discover they had a sheet with his name and photograph. “They showed me the photo and said, ‘is this you?’ and I had to agree it was me.” He was out of work for more than seven months and was so hungry he ate wild watercress growing on a playground.
The mother who found herself in a cycle of debt
When San San Aye left her three sons with her sister in Yangon, she hoped to make enough money in Thailand to give them a better life.
She settled in the border town of Mae Sot and started working at VKG in 2017, marking and cutting out the denim to make F&F jeans. She said her pay was typically £4 a day, though could be as little as £2, a fraction of the £7 a day Thai minimum wage.
“I kept hoping that next month the money would be enough but it never was,” she said.
Her job meant starting at about 8am and finishing at 10 or 11 at night almost every day, she said, unless a big order came, then she worked until the next morning. “I wanted to sleep so much but if I didn’t finish, I couldn’t go home.”
She said she was paid according to what she could make and not paid overtime, leaving her with just enough to cover food and accommodation. Sending money home meant skipping meals.
Her middle son, Kaung Htet Kyaw, did well at school in Yangon and wanted to be a doctor. She hoped that funding his education could change the family’s future. But just six months before he was due to take his final exams it became untenable. Tuition fees cost about £20 a month and then there were books, transport and food. His parents asked him to join them in Thailand.
He was 18 and found himself working at the factory with his mother, gathering up scraps of material as a sewing line helper for about £2 a day. Now 23, he works in another low wage factory, his ambition of becoming a doctor more remote than ever.
Like many families, they described being stuck in a cycle of debt. Kaung Htet Kyaw said: “Sometimes the debt collector came asking for money but we couldn’t pay. I’m angry they didn’t give wages on time.”
His mother said: “Life here is more difficult than living in Myanmar. I came here with hopes but those dreams did not happen.”
The female line leader who led the fightback
It was summer 2020 when Hla Hla Tey decided to do something about the factory where she had been working for more than two years. She was a quality control supervisor at VKG and said she worked overnight several days a week, leaving her to cycle home on the highway in the early morning, barely able to stay awake.
She said her pay declined over time and that when she asked a manager to be paid the minimum wage, he called her a dog, saying: “If you don’t want to work at the factory any more you can get out.”
When auditors came in July she said she was in a group who spoke to them. “I felt really angry and could not tolerate it any more,” she said. Many other workers “were also angry” she said, but most would “not dare to tell the truth because they were afraid to lose their jobs”.
She said the auditors asked how many days the factory was closed in a month and she was quick to set them straight. “I asked the counter-question: ‘What do you mean, day off or holiday?’” she said. “This factory never closes on festival holidays. We have one day off a month when they pay our wages.”
She said the auditor then asked whether she was paid the minimum wage and whether it was paid into her bank account. “I explained that even though they opened a bank account with my name, I can’t use it. In my bag I had a payslip, I said, ‘this is how I receive my wages’.” She said the payslip showed £74 for a month’s work, instead of the £280 suggested by the factory’s records.
She was one of more than a dozen workers who told the Guardian that the factory had taken control of their bank accounts, changed their passwords and paid them in cash, leaving a paper trail suggesting minimum wage pay.
She said despite the long days and low pay, bosses were quick to criticise. “If there was a quality problem they would shout at us and say ‘you must be blind, do you not have eyes?’.”
She said that despite having social security deductions from her wages she had to pay for her healthcare after having breast cancer.
At 54, Hla Hla Tay was the oldest to lose her job in 2020 and has struggled to find work since, saying factories rarely employ over-50s. Unemployed and unable to pay rent, she is living in a Buddhist monastery and relying on handouts from the relations in Myanmar she moved away to support.
She is worried about her future but also clear-eyed about her life at VKG. “That period was a time I was in hell,” she said.
Injured carrying heavy machinery
Aung Tun, 34, holds out his forearm to show a long deep scar. He worked for VKG from May 2019, first folding clothes and then logging items going in and out of the factory and loading up F&F orders on to trucks.
In January 2020, he said he was clearing the factory floor before an audit when the injury happened. He said he was hurrying to load a heavy interlocker sewing machine – a machine with a sharp knife that cuts fabric as it sews – on to a truck, when it fell and sliced into his arm.
“It was bleeding a lot. I had to concentrate not to pass out,” he said. “The machine was really heavy, it needed four or five people to carry it but only three of us did.”
Aung Tun said the wound needed 13 stitches, but that a manager at the factory told him to lie to the hospital. “The factory didn’t take any responsibility … they said when you go to the clinic, say it’s a bicycle accident, don’t talk about a workplace accident.”
Aung Tun said he was typically paid less than £5 a day and that the factory often delayed renewing his work permit “which made it difficult to leave” and also meant his records looked irregular when he tried to find work later.
“I felt extremely tired from overworking and the pay was very low,” he said. “We only took a rest at lunchtime, the rest of the time we were working, working, working.”
The blacklisted father looking after his daughter
Si Thu Aung, 32, kept meticulous records of pay and production of the more than 20 sewers he supervised. He said they produced 10-15,000 pairs of F&F jeans a month and were paid only according to what they could make.
Sitting outside the room he shares with his wife and daughter, he still has piles of paperwork that appear to document the meagre pay his sewers received but he said officials told him it was fake because it did not have factory branding.
Once workers told auditors that the factory had lied about their pay, Si Thu Aung said he and other line leaders were summoned to an urgent meeting. “A manager said, ‘you need to control your workers’ and we spoke back to them and said the factory needs to pay them [properly],” he said.
After standing up for the sewers on his line, he was told to apply as a new worker and when he refused, he was dismissed.
Later, when he tried to find a new job at nearby factories he kept being knocked back and believes he was blacklisted. Two factories told him they were not open when he heard they were. “I know it was because I had worked for VK,” he said. “They understood that we were people who made problems for our employer.”
For five months he was unemployed and has not been able to find a well-paid job since. Now he looks after his five-year-old daughter, Thoon Yati, while his wife works.
The man who claims the factory made him help its cover-up of his low pay
Ye Zaw Zo, 31, was an ironing worker on the sewing line and said he typically made about £3 a day. He was paid according to how much he could iron but when he got faster he says they lowered his rate from 1p for every dozen garments ironed, to almost half that.
Like many of the workers, he said the factory had control of his bank card to make it appear he was paid the minimum wage.
One day he said the factory tried to withdraw money from his account but typed in his password incorrectly. He said they sent him to the bank to reset the password and withdraw £340 – a generous monthly wage above the Thai minimum.
“I said I would need the transport cost to go by motorbike,” he said. But when he returned to the factory with the cash, he said he was asked to hand it all over at the entrance and to sign a document saying he had been paid that amount.
Instead, he said he was only given back his actual monthly wage of £87. “I told them I needed to get back the cost of the transport,” he said, “but I had to use my own money.”
The line leader whose parents were lobbied to drop the case
As a line leader in charge of more than 20 sewers, Phyo Phyo Mar’s evidence about pay and conditions was crucial to a hearing in the Thai labour courts this summer.
She said a worker loyal to the factory went to speak to her parents in August, the day before she was due to give evidence in the Thai labour court, to try to persuade them to tell her to drop the case.
She has a carrier bag full of documents that look inconvenient for the factory, including pay sheets and garment sheets that appear to detail the dozen pay rate for each F&F item.
Her husband worked at the factory too and also lost his job in August 2020. In the last two years they have had to spend all the savings they managed to build through moving to Thailand, including some land in Myanmar.
Phyo Phyo Mar was pregnant with her second child when they lost their jobs and hasn’t been able to work since. She applied at factories but they were not interested in hiring someone pregnant. Now she and her parents have health problems and they are having to borrow money for food. “I worry all the time about our finances. We can take on debt for food but we can’t keep borrowing.”
Sirikul Tatiyawongpaibul, the managing director of VKG, called the allegations “hearsay” and said they should be presented in court and could not be commented on, given an ongoing case in the Thai labour courts.
She said: “The company’s rules and regulations are in line with Thailand’s labour law, with employment and working conditions in line with conditions laid out by the department of labour protection and welfare and customers … The company has fought the case with facts and does not plan to shut down operations. It is necessary for the company to demand justice under Thailand’s judicial process.”
A Tesco spokesperson said: “The allegations highlighted in this report are incredibly serious, and had we identified issues like this at the time they took place, we would have ended our relationship with this supplier immediately. We understand the Thai labour court has awarded compensation to those involved, and we would continue to urge the supplier to reimburse employees for any wages they’re owed.”
