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H&M under fire over Cambodia mass faintings

H&M has been criticized along with several other major clothing makers for how they treat workers in Cambodia, where hundreds of employees at a plant run by the Swedish fashion giant mysteriously passed out in August.

H&M under fire over Cambodia mass faintings

Next week, Cambodian factory workers plan to hold a “people’s tribunal” presided over by an international panel of judges who will hear testimony about adverse working conditions and low pay.

While representatives from multinational clothing brands Puma and Adidas plan to attend the hearing, H&M said it won’t attend, choosing instead to supply information about what it was doing to address worker concerns, the Guardian newspaper reported.

Jeroen Merk with the Clean Clothes Campaign advocacy group told the newspaper it was “disappointing” that H&M, as well as Gap, wouldn’t attend the panel.

The hearing is being organized by the Asian Floor Wage Alliance advocacy group, which argues that conditions in Cambodian clothing factories violate basic human rights and that the minimum wage of $61 per month is too low.

While refusing to send a representative to the hearing, H&M said it welcomes initiatives that highlight issues related to workers’ rights.

“We work actively to strengthen the rights of textile workers,” H&M’s head of sustainability, Helena Helmersson, told the TT news agency.

“Our code of conduct requires that we pay at least the legal minimum wage. But the same factories that H&M purchases products from also sew for other large chains. There are often misunderstandings about how much control we have over wages.”

Helmersson pointed out that it’s hard for clothing companies to determine what an appropriate minimum wage ought to be in a given country and that H&M participates in the Fair Wage Network, which tracks wages paid in the textile industry.

At the hearing, hundreds of workers are expected to testify about a series of mass faintings that occurred in August at factories that supply clothes to H&M and other global brands.

According to Helmersson, the Swedish clothing retailer has hired consultants to examine what may have caused the incident, in which hundreds of workers suddenly lost consciousness.

She said that one explanation may be that the workers lacked ways to air their complaints or that they were working too much overtime.

“Overtime is a general problem in the industry. It’s a challenge both for us and for other buyers in these countries,” Helmersson told TT.

The Cambodian textile industry employs around 300,000 workers and grew by 28 percent last year. Most of the factories are owned by Chinese or Taiwanese companies.

The workers are mainly low paid women and the unsatisfactory working conditions have led to a slew of strikes and protests in the last few years.

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BUSINESS

Swedish retailer H&M sees profits slump after Russia exit

Swedish fashion retailer H&M reported a sizeable drop in third-quarter profit on Thursday following its decision to leave the Russian market.

Swedish retailer H&M sees profits slump after Russia exit

The world’s number two clothing group is among a slew of Western companies that have exited Russia following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

H&M paused all sales in the country in March and announced in July that it would wind down operations, although it would reopen stores for “a limited period of time” to offload its remaining inventory.

The company said Thursday its net profit fell to 531 million kronor ($47 million) in the third quarter, down 89 percent from the same period last year. “The third quarter has largely been impacted by our decision to pause sales and then wind down the business in Russia,” chief executive Helena Helmersson said in a statement.

The group said in its earnings statement that it would launch cost-cutting measures that would result in savings totalling two billion kronor.

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