The working relationship would continue, unless workers file another complaint against the same factory or another one that the contractor hired during those six months. Now, if Fashion Nova learns that a factory has been charged with violating laws “governing the wages and hours of its employees, child labor, forced labor or unsafe working conditions,” the brand will put the middleman who hired that factory on a six-month “probation,” it said in a statement. The company’s lawyers told the officials that they had taken immediate action and had already updated the brand’s agreement with vendors. This year, Fashion Nova’s labels were the ones found the most frequently by federal investigators looking into garment factories that pay egregiously low wages, according to a person familiar with the investigations.
The Labor Department has collected millions in back wages and penalties from Los Angeles garment businesses in recent years, but has not fined a retailer. Under federal law, brands cannot be penalized for wage theft in factories if they can credibly claim that they did not know their clothes were made by workers paid illegally low wages. “People just don’t want to believe it’s true in their own backyard.”įor all their seediness, these factories are still producing clothes for major American retailers. “Consumers can say, ‘Well, of course that’s what it’s like in Bangladesh or Vietnam,’ but they are developing countries,” Mr. “The clothes are very expensive for what they pay us,” Ms. She continued to work in factories sewing Fashion Nova clothes, noticing the $12 price tags on the tops she had stitched together for cents. Cortes left Coco Love and later reached a settlement with the company for $5,000 in back wages.
The brand’s clingy dresses and animal-print jumpsuits are often made by people like Mercedes Cortes, working in ramshackle buildings that smell like bathrooms. Instead, it places bulk orders with companies that design the clothes and then ship fabric to separately owned sewing contractors, where workers stitch the clothes together and stick Fashion Nova’s label on them. The company does not deal directly with factories. It would not specify the overall percentage made in the United States. Fashion Nova’s supply chain has shifted since then, and now the brand says it makes less than half of its clothes in Los Angeles.
Saghian said about 80 percent of the brand’s clothes were made in the United States. “Any suggestion that Fashion Nova is responsible for underpaying anyone working on our brand is categorically false.” “We have already had a highly productive and positive meeting with the Department of Labor in which we discussed our ongoing commitment to ensuring that all workers involved with the Fashion Nova brand are appropriately compensated for the work they do,” Erica Meierhans, Fashion Nova’s general counsel, said in a statement to The Times. In a statement, a spokeswoman said the department “continues to ensure employers receive compliance assistance with the overtime and minimum wage requirements, and the Wage and Hour Division is committed to enforcing the law.”Īfter repeated violations were found at factories making Fashion Nova clothes, federal officials met with company representatives. The Labor Department declined to comment on the details of the investigations. Those factories, which are hired by middlemen to produce garments for fashion brands, paid their sewers as little as $2.77 an hour, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
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