Justice for Jeyasre: how a brutal homicide led to a greater deal for garment staff in India | World improvement

Ask the ladies working at Natchi Apparels within the historic metropolis of Dindigul in Tamil Nadu and plenty of will describe the turnaround of their working circumstances within the garment manufacturing unit over the previous 5 years as extraordinary.

On 5 January 2021 the decomposing physique of Jeyasre Kathiravel, a 21-year-old Dalit lady who was an worker of Natchi, then an H&M Group provider, was discovered on a strip of farmland just a few miles from her village after she did not return dwelling following a shift on New 12 months’s Day.

A person named V Thangadurai, her supervisor, was arrested and put in police custody, the place he confessed to Kathiravel’s rape and homicide.

Her fellow staff described Thangadurai as a predator, who sexually harassed and intimidated Kathiravel with impunity for months earlier than brutally escalating his actions. She had complained however didn’t know how you can cease him.

Different ladies confronted comparable issues. Selvi, a tailor who joined the manufacturing unit in 2020, recollects staff loudly sobbing or quietly struggling on account of the common “manufacturing tortures”.

After the killing, and by the point worldwide staff’ rights organisations such because the Asia Flooring Wage Alliance (Afwa) and World Labor Justice (GLJ) had been concerned, H&M had dropped Natchi, a subsidiary of the bigger Eastman Exports, as a provider.

It took a year-long “Justice for Jeyasre” marketing campaign, plus an investigation by the Employee Rights Consortium, which corroborated the ladies’s allegations, earlier than the Tamil Nadu Textile and Frequent Labour Union (TTCU) – an unbiased, female-led and majority-Dalit union that represented many Natchi workers – sat down with Eastman to signal what would turn into referred to as the Dindigul Settlement to Finish Gender-Primarily based Violence and Harassment.

Thivya Rakini, TTCU’s president, says: “Later, we got here to know that mid-management by no means took this concern to the highest administration. After which a number of labour teams and worldwide feminist teams stood in solidarity with us, protesting outdoors H&M shops and reaching out to stakeholders.”

The binding contract borrowed classes from an identical accord signed in Lesotho just a few years earlier. However the Dindigul settlement was completely different, says Nandita Shivakumar, who served because the campaigns coordinator for Afwa on the time, as a result of it had the sturdy presence of an area union.

This ensured that the settlement was “firmly grounded on the store flooring and successfully applied on the native stage by means of sustained engagement with each staff and administration”.

H&M Group, regardless of now not shopping for clothes from Natchi, additionally signed a supporting settlement with TTCU, Afwa and GLJ, offering assist and funding for the adjustments that needed to be made. Later, Hole Inc and the proprietor of Calvin Klein, PVH Corp, did the identical, regardless of having by no means sourced from Natchi, although each had contracted with different Eastman factories previously.

Collectively, they offered US$300,000 (£223,000) throughout the Dindigul settlement, which concluded in October after a seven-month extension from the unique March 2025 finish date.

The manufacturers’ mixed funding has helped to retain unionists on the manufacturing unit flooring to have interaction with Natchi’s administration on a near-daily foundation, prepare shop-floor displays to report and resolve cases of sexual harassment, and create an unbiased grievance mechanism to research and make findings on complaints of non-compliance by Eastman to honour the settlement.

Jeyalakshmi, a cutter who has labored at Natchi for the previous seven years, says: “I by no means thought the scenario of my manufacturing unit would change. We ladies had been by no means revered. Now we’re now not harassed and there isn’t the identical feeling of hostility as earlier than. We have now actual freedom. Truly, the lads are afraid of us now as a result of the grievance mechanism may be very sturdy.”

Alagesan Senniappan, a senior vice-president at Eastman, says it has been a win-win scenario. Employees have a renewed sense of belief within the administration and productiveness has elevated. He says the settlement has created a “extra inclusive and collaborative setting, strengthening each compliance and operational concord inside the manufacturing unit”.

“Though the settlement has formally expired, our dedication continues,” Senniappan provides. “We plan to maintain working intently with TTCU, and we have now already applied the important thing learnings from the settlement throughout our different factories.”

A spokesperson for H&M stated it remained in talks with labour organisations and continued to work on the prevention of gender-based violence and harassment in its provide chain in India and globally.

However there’s disappointment that different manufacturers didn’t signal the Dindigul settlement. Neither have they arrive hammering on Natchi’s doorways with a slew of orders, regardless of what Sarosh Kuruvilla, a professor at Cornell College’s ILR College who has studied the Dindigul settlement at size, describes as “overwhelming proof” that the deal was assembly the objectives for which it was created.

When the final massive shipments to H&M Group had been dispatched in June 2021, employment at Natchi fell by half to simply beneath 1,700 staff, in line with Kuruvilla’s report. In April 2025, Natchi employed greater than 1,800 staff, or 55% of its workforce in January 2021.

Regardless of buy-ins from manufacturers resembling Walmart and Zara’s proprietor, Inditex, Kuruvilla says the manufacturing unit has been unable to interchange H&M Group with an identical “high-volume, high-value” purchaser, which has made weathering the worldwide financial slowdown tougher.

“We’ve had three years of proof – a lot of proof – that the settlement is working, however the manufacturing unit isn’t getting sufficient enterprise,” he says.

Kuruvilla believes that the seven weeks in 2022 when a “withhold launch order” issued by US Customs and Border Safety was in place, which led to Natchi’s shipments being detained on suspicion of compelled labour, may have had a “chilling impact” that was too tough to reverse.

The unhealthy press that adopted Kathiravel’s homicide, and which continues to dominate on-line searches for the manufacturing unit, might be one other issue, he provides, in addition to the eye-watering 50% so-called reciprocal tariff that america has imposed on India.

However Kuruvilla thinks there’s another excuse some manufacturers are unwilling to enter enterprise with the manufacturing unit.

“There are many manufacturers that won’t supply from a manufacturing unit the place there’s a collective bargaining settlement or a labour administration settlement as a result of they assume that’s not a very good factor [for business],” he says. “Any person will say: ‘Oh, they’ll go on strike any time.’”

Shivakumar doesn’t assume the business cares. “I believe the CSDDD [the EU’s corporate sustainability due diligence directive] was a method ahead to a point, however now it’s been watered down.”

There have been a few notable exceptions, such because the legally enforceable Accord on Hearth and Constructing Security in Bangladesh, which about 200 manufacturers rallied round after greater than 1,130 garment staff died when the Rana Plaza garment manufacturing unit collapsed on the outskirts of Dhaka in 2013.

“Until there’s some huge tragedy, no person will do something,” Shivakumar says.