Latest news with #FruitoftheLoom
Fast Company
2 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Inside Walmart's ambitious plan to make your clothes in America again
On a crisp day in May, Josh Blackman, a third generation cotton farmer, is sitting atop his 14-foot tall John Deere planter on his family farm in Littleton, North Carolina. The planter is an engineering marvel. Its 10 arms create neat rows in the soil, then drop cotton seeds at the right depth, allowing one man to do the work of 50 laborers. By October, this field will be blanketed with fluffy white bolls of cotton that never fail to take the 34-year-old Blackman's breath away. 'Cotton is so pretty at harvest time,' he tells me. Blackman's grandparents established Warren Farms in 1941. Until the 1960s, roughly 95% of the clothes Americans wore were made domestically, so cotton from Warren Farms would travel by truck to nearby mills and factories to become Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and Levi's jeans. But over the past five decades, the U.S. apparel industry has been decimated. Today, 97% of the clothes that Americans buy is imported, largely from China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. The majority of Blackman's crop will be shipped to Asia where it will be turned into fabric, then cut and sewn into garments at low-wage factories. Blackman often feels he is at the mercy of geopolitical forces. He's competing with farmers in developing countries who produce more cheaply because they pay lower wages and have weaker environmental protections. China, the world's biggest cotton importer, has an outsized influence on the commodity's price. This year, Blackman expects to lose money on his harvest because the price of cotton is less than 70 cents a pound, down about 10 cents from 2024, which was already considered a bad year. 'The weather determines the crop, and the market determines what we get for it,' he says. But Blackman believes that if apparel manufacturing returned to the United States, there would be more demand for domestic cotton, allowing him to earn more. 'Bringing the factories to America—opening them back up—will create a market for my cotton right here,' he says. For years, the idea of breathing life back into American clothing factories, reversing half a century of off-shoring, seemed like a pipe dream. But the plate tectonics of the apparel industry are shifting. Over the past decade, dozens of American-made labels like Buck Mason, American Trench, Imogene & Willie, and Duckworth have sprung up, tapping into the skeletal remains of the domestic supply chain. This was a small-scale effort: These high-end brands make clothes for affluent customers who care about sustainability, ethical labor, and durability. But everything changed last summer, when Walmart—the largest company in the world—entered the picture. The retailer dropped a $12.98 T-shirt made end-to-end in the U.S. just in time for the Fourth of July. Subscribe to the Design latest innovations in design brought to you every weekday SIGN UP Privacy Policy | Fast Company Newsletters advertisement The final deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
8 Berkshire Hathaway companies that Warren Buffett is handing over to Greg Abel
Warren Buffett announced Saturday that he will retire as Berkshire Hathaway's (BRK.A) CEO at the end of 2025 and hand the reins to Greg Abel, a transition that's long been expected given that Buffett publicly named Abel as his successor in 2021. Buffett, 94, will stay on as Berkshire's board chair. While the move was expected, it comes as a jolt given the Oracle of Omaha's legendary run as the head of the $1.1 trillion conglomerate. Abel, 62, first joined Berkshire in 2000. He has steadily climbed the ranks and has been the vice chairman of Berkshire's non-insurance companies since 2018. The companies he oversees reported $5 billion in earnings in the first quarter of 2025, according to CNN. Buffett has been hyping Abel as his heir apparent for years, telling CNBC in 2023 that Abel 'does all the work, and I take all the bows.' Buffett added, 'He's a big improvement on me, but don't tell anybody.' Now, Abel will be the CEO of a multinational conglomerate that has subsidiaries in industries across food, retail, transportation, and more. Here are eight of the biggest companies Abel will oversee when he takes over at the end of the year. The fast food chain, famous for its burgers and frozen treats — specifically the Blizzard sundae — was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway in 1998. Today, Dairy Queen has 6,800 locations worldwide, about 4,500 of which are in the U.S. DQ restaurants pulled in an estimated $4.6 billion in the U.S. in 2022, according to Statista. Berkshire acquired this Bowling Green, Kentucky-based clothing brand in 2002 for about $835 million. Though Fruit of the Loom is arguably best known for its undies, the company also manufactures T-shirts, outerwear, and sportswear, plus sports equipment through its subsidiary, Spalding. Fruit of the Loom employs more than 30,000 people worldwide. Abel began working at CalEnergy in 1992. That firm later acquired MidAmerican Energy, and Abel became the company's president. Two years later, MidAmerican Energy was acquired by Berkshire and renamed Berkshire Hathaway Energy. The utility company is based in Des Moines, Iowa, where Abel now lives. It employs about 24,000 people worldwide and reported $25.6 billion in revenue in 2023. NetJets was the first private business jet charter in the world when it was founded as Executive Jet Airways in 1964. Berkshire acquired the company for $725 million in 1998 and renamed it NetJets four years later. Today, the firm owns the world's largest fleet of private jets, with over 750 aircraft in operation around the world. Abel will soon top the coppertop. Berkshire acquired Duracell in 2016 by exchanging the shares it owned in Procter & Gamble (PG) for ownership of the battery maker. The century-old, Chicago-headquartered firm employs 8,000 people and pulls in $2 billion in annual revenue, according to Fortune. Based in Buffett's home city of Omaha, Nebraska, jewelry retailer Borsheims has been around since it was founded by a Norwegian immigrant in 1870. Buffett acquired a majority stake in the company for an undisclosed amount in 1989, and today, the company sells a variety of luxury jewelry, watches, and other accessories both in person and online. Borsheims' 62,000-foot Omaha store is the location for Berkshire's shareholder-only events at its annual meeting. Among Abel's charges will be BNSF, the largest freight railroad in the U.S. The firm owns 33,400 miles of track spanning 28 states, including three transcontinental routes. BNSF, formed by the merger of two railway companies in 1995, was publicly traded until Buffett acquired all its shares in 2010 and took it private. Its headquarters are in Fort Worth, Texas, and the company employs about 36,000 people. Because Abel was chairman of Berkshire's non-insurance companies, he didn't oversee GEICO — but as CEO, now he will. Berkshire has owned the automotive insurance giant since Buffett acquired all its shares in 1996, three years before the company introduced its beloved gecko mascot. Founded in 1936, GEICO today has 40,000 employees and insures more than 28 million vehicles. It made $7.8 billion in underwriting profit in 2024. For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kentuckians need a new trade policy, not a chaotic trade war
Smart policies, including selective tariffs, can help bring back more manufacturing to the U. S. but that's not what's being rolled out. (Getty Images) Fruit of the Loom apparel plants once dotted the Kentucky landscape, with 11,000 workers at factories in Jamestown, Frankfort, Campbellsville, Franklin, Greensburg, Princeton and Bowling Green. In 1987, the company was the state's second-biggest manufacturer. But over time, Fruit of the Loom began closing plants and moving production to lower-wage countries like Honduras, Haiti and Vietnam. By 2014, all production in the state was gone. These plant closings were devastating for laid-off workers and their communities. And they were the result of a bipartisan consensus around trade that prioritized the bottom line of powerful corporate interests above all else. President Donald Trump has long recognized the public anger from such trade policies and is now using it to impose high and blanket tariffs on imports. While selective tariffs can make sense as part of an industrial policy targeting strategic sectors, the chaotic, broad-based policies the president has rolled out threaten to weaken the economy, raise prices for consumers and harm Kentucky industries without helping address the nation's enormous trade deficit. The era of a growing U.S. trade imbalance began in the 1970s with deregulation of the international flow of capital. The trend grew with passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 and greatly accelerated when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Between 2000 and 2010, Kentucky lost a net 100,000 manufacturing jobs in total, one-third of what we had 10 years earlier. The state lost an estimated 45,400 net jobs directly from the China shock and at least 12,100 from NAFTA. Especially hard-hit was employment in computer and electronic parts, metal products and machinery, apparel, furniture and textiles. Politicians and many economists claimed these changes would be good for all of us. But while consumers got cheaper goods from Wal-Mart, towns were hollowed out, families went bankrupt and deaths of despair rose from drugs, alcohol and suicide. Proponents said the government could always compensate those who lost jobs with financial assistance and retraining. But the money never came, and the training was often a dead end. Meanwhile the big winners from the shift of jobs overseas were Wall Street, which attracted foreign financial investment from the overvalued U. S. dollar; manufacturing companies that made higher profits off cheaper labor in other countries; and corporations that weakened American unions by using the threat of closure to frighten organizing efforts and win concessions. There are smart ways to change course and use industrial policy — including selective tariffs — to address the yawning trade deficit and make things better for domestic and foreign workers. Policies could help support strategic industries like autos, steel, energy and semiconductors through public investment, research and development, and union-partnered workforce training in addition to targeted tariffs. That can help bring back more manufacturing to the U. S., needed not just for jobs but because of its proven linkage to innovation and to build more resilient supply chains that were so clearly lacking in the pandemic. At the same time, we can engage in mutually beneficial trade while better conditioning access to U. S. markets on protection of labor rights and the environment in other countries, helping improve what are often horrifically exploitative working conditions. But that's not what is being rolled out. The on-again, off-again and blanket nature of the new tariff policy is creating economic uncertainty that is slowing consumer spending and business investment. The us-against-the-world nature of the tariffs and the bullying trade war stance are already hurting U. S. exports that are facing retaliatory tariffs in industries like Kentucky bourbon. High, comprehensive tariffs can also further increase the value of the dollar and make Kentucky-made products that contain foreign inputs more expensive, hurting U. S. manufacturers and farmers further. And the cost of tariffs is likely to be passed down to consumers at a time when many are rightly concerned about inflation and the unaffordable prices of basic household goods. At the same time, the administration's domestic policies are weakening workers' bargaining power through attacks on unions and undermining the public investments needed in an effective jobs policy by gutting vital federal agencies. Failed trade policies have created the political room for what the president is now doing. It will take recognizing the ways this policy is the wrong answer to the right question to discover what Kentuckians truly need.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Fruit of the Loom Transformed Workers' Rights in Honduras. It's Now Accused of Union-Busting.
The name had also been a promise. For the nearly 2,000 dismissed workers of Jerzees de Honduras, a Fruit of the Loom factory that produced clothing under the Russell Athletic brand, the opening of Jerzees Nuevo Dia in 2009 marked a literal 'new day,' not only for their reinstated employment but also for industrial relations in the Central American nation, where more than half the population lives under the poverty line. More from Sourcing Journal The Illusion of Choice: Labor Rights and Sustainable Business Can Shein Improve Garment Workers' Lives Without the 'Flashy PR Play'? 'A Stain on Humanity': What Canceled ILAB Grants Mean for Fashion Production It was only a year before that an investigation by the Worker Rights Consortium, a labor watchdog group from Washington, D.C., concluded that the closure of Jerzees de Honduras mere days after Fruit of the Loom failed to reach a collective bargaining agreement with union representatives, was motivated 'in significant part' by anti-union hostility. But WRC documented other breaches of workers' association rights, including Fruit of the Loom's imposition of an employer-dominated scheme of worker representation known as a 'collective pact' or the 'delegate system' that it said undermined genuine freedom of association. Workers complained of harassment by supervisors, including threats that the factory could close if they didn't stop organizing. Union officials and government inspectors were also denied access to the plant, they said. Several of Jerzees de Honduras' workers had arrived from another Fruit of the Loom factory, Jerzees Choloma, which WRC said had fired 145 workers in 2007 in retaliation for forming a union. After several student groups protested, the company rehired the workers, paid their back wages and recognized their union. And when Jerzees Choloma shuttered a few months later—without 'persuasive' evidence that this was motivated by union-busting, according to WRC—the workers were allowed to transfer their employment. So when Fruit of the Loom said that it would be closing Jerzees de Honduras for 'economic reasons,' many didn't buy it. It was, by that point, the only facility it owned with union representation. Fruit of the Loom, through Russell Athletic, was one of the largest producers of American collegiate apparel at the time, something that gave student activists organized under United Students Against Sweatshops no small amount of leverage. As a result, more than a dozen colleges, including Columbia University, Cornell University and the University of Michigan yanked their apparel licensing agreements with Russell Athletic, citing codes of conduct that required licensees to guarantee workers' fundamental rights. The Fair Labor Association, the multi-stakeholder organization to which Fruit of the Loom belonged until last fall, also put the company under review. In 2009, Fruit of the Loom's Jerzees de Honduras workers' union and its parent organization, the Central General de Trabajadores, or CGT, came together to sign what would become known as the Washington Agreement, which WRC called an 'unprecedented' win for collective bargaining rights because of its legally binding nature, co-governed oversight and dispute resolution mechanism. As part of the pact, Fruit of the Loom opened Jerzees Nuevo Dia. It signaled the dawn of a different approach, one that provided unionists the opportunity to expand collective bargaining in Honduras as a whole. 'It was profoundly groundbreaking,' said Mark Anner, dean and distinguished professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, who wrote a report in 2022 placing into context the far-reaching impacts of the campaign for Pennsylvania State University's Center for Global Workers' Rights. Jerzees Nuevo Dia's opening, he said, created a 'snowball effect,' first rolling in other Fruit of the Loom factories, most of which formed unions of their own, then those belonging to other companies. By the end of 2021, Anner said, 22 collective bargaining agreements covered nearly 46,000 garment workers, or some 44 percent of the 105,000 people making clothing in Honduras. Wages rose to such an extent over the decade and a half since that the country's living wage gap stands at 4 percent, versus 61 percent in Mexico and 63 percent in Bangladesh, according to WageIndicator estimates. 'I've been engaged with the global garment industry for 30-plus years, and I've never seen anything like what happened in Honduras,' he said. 'Because it did something that other processes haven't done. It not only improved working conditions, but it also empowered workers in a real and sustainable way. They had their union. They bargained collectively every so many years. They negotiated. They dealt with issues, not just wages, but even harassment at work, transportation, lunch subsidies. It was so incredibly important.' Now, years of progress could soon unravel. Jerzees Nuevo Dia, along with another Fruit of the Loom unit known as Confecciones Dos Caminos, are on the chopping block. The company, said Theresa Haas, director of global strategies at Workers United, one of the civil society signatories of a letter protesting their closures, has been 'quietly and slowly' winding down five of the six facilities it operated in Honduras while ramping up imports from third-party supplier factories in countries such as Bangladesh, where workers do not benefit from the same protections. The only plant that Fruit of the Loom has not targeted also happens to be the sole non-union one. 'The alarm really started to be raised when the remaining two unionized factories were announced for closure,' Haas said. The 'new day for labor rights' that Jerzees Nuevo Dia embodied will sunset in May, as will any remaining production at Confecciones Dos Caminos. Layoffs have been in full swing at both facilities since January. Fruit of the Loom has defended what it describes as 'operation restructuring,' saying that it needs to 'consolidate manufacturing capacity, adjust to changes in product demand and ensure the company remains financially healthy' amid 'significant disruption' in the North American market, including the 'considerable growth' of retailer private label offerings and 'increased competition' from products imported directly from Asia. It also refuted claims that it was anti-union. 'Unfortunately, our restructuring effort has impacted multiple company facilities in the U.S., El Salvador, Haiti and Honduras over the last several years,' it said in a statement. 'Decisions to close facilities are only made after careful review and consideration of alternative actions and are in no way based on the presence of unions in a facility. Fruit of the Loom has set an example in its commitment to freedom of association in its facilities, and this commitment remains by continuing to operate multiple unionized facilities in Honduras and elsewhere globally.' It is Fruit of the Loom's hope, it added, that it can 'once again expand our operations in the Honduran communities in the future.' But Evalina Argueta, a coordinator for CGT who led the fight at the former Jerzees de Honduras, said workers believe that the factory closures are a form of union-busting. It doesn't make sense otherwise, they said, to retain a non-unionized over a unionized unit. Fruit of the Loom, according to Argueta, had already tried to negotiate a more favorable collective bargaining agreement 'for the health of the company,' which the union had agreed to because it thought this would preserve the two facilities. This did not appear to be the case, however. 'We have made it clear to the company that we know that this closure of factories is anti-union,' Argueta said through a translator. 'We have proved that they are shutting down every unionized factory, except for the non-union plant, as well as moving production from Honduras.' The relationship between Fruit of the Loom and the unions representing its Honduran workers has deteriorated since the passing of then-CEO Rick Medlin in 2016, she said. When the Washington Agreement was signed, Medlin said he 'did not just want to solve this one issue; he wanted to provide an example to the world.' Following his death due to natural causes at 68, Agueta wrote that 'it is very sad when good people leave us.' She described Medlin as someone who, with 'great humility and respect,' helped strengthen day-to-day labor relations between CGT, the unions and Fruit of the Loom at its Honduran factories. With multiple management changes that followed, those at the Fruit of the Loom's helm didn't have the same desire to engage with unionized workers in the same way, she added. 'You know, we have to ask a basic question: why is it every time there's some market downturn, the first factories that get closed are the unionized ones?' Anner asked. 'There's a pattern there that we've seen in this industry forever, and that's what concerns me about this case. You're not only taking jobs from so many workers that had good jobs, but you're also killing an example that's so meaningful.' The dismantling of the Washington Agreement, and indeed any collective bargaining agreements workers had with Fruit of the Loom, would be a profound loss, Anner said. His research indicates that compared to workers who do not have a collective bargaining agreement, Honduran garment workers buoyed by negotiated clauses are 67 percent more likely to be able to choose whether or not they worked overtime, 82 percent more likely to have subsidized meals, 94 percent more likely to have access to a company savings and loan account and 83 percent less likely to experience increasing work intensity over time. Workers not covered by a collective bargaining agreement are also 20 percent more likely to face verbal abuse and, for women in particular, 11 percent more likely to experience sexual harassment in the workplace. Conversely, women workers who are covered by collective bargaining agreements are nearly 120 percent more likely to have a valid mechanism at work for addressing gender-based violence and harassment. The expansion of collective bargaining, meanwhile, allowed unions to consolidate their power, expanding their influence beyond unionized workplaces through national tripartite bargaining with employer and government representatives that produced significant wage increases for garment workers, yes, but also provided them with respect and dignity at work, Anner said. 'We always go straight to the wage issue, but unions do so much more,' he said. 'They establish grievance procedures. What's the greatest fear? You get harassed and you speak up, and the only result is you don't resolve the problem and you get fired for speaking. Unions protect against that. My fear is that without that union protection, the factories that are remaining that don't have unions are not just facing lower wages and a squeeze on benefits but also abuse because workers aren't meeting their quotas. And we know that's so common and endemic in this industry.' The effects wouldn't be confined to Fruit of the Loom, either. Argueta said that the company's actions could have a broader chilling effect on freedom of association in Honduras. Workers in the country have always looked up to the maquila sector. 'For non-union workers to see that two factories that do have a union have been shut down is only going to make workers more fearful of organizing,' she said. Right now, CGT and the unions are scrambling. They're urging Fruit of the Loom, among other things, to expand, by six to 10 months, severance payments for workers with medical issues from years of repetitive, backbreaking, high-stress work. Argueta said that Fruit of the Loom has long reaped the benefits of the Washington Agreement: Production was high and their reputation received a boost. 'We as workers knew that if Fruit of the Loom rose, we did too, so we wanted to do good work with them,' she said. 'Now the workers feel defrauded.' Jeff Hermanson is an American union activist who played a pivotal role in the 2009 negotiations. He said that what Fruit of the Loom is doing now puts a 'tragic conclusion' to an agreement that provided freedom of association and collective bargaining rights to thousands of workers in Honduras. 'Fruit of the Loom's decision to close unionized factories in Honduras is a result of the global apparel industry's structural and systemic injustice, in which global brands survive—and in some cases thrive—through exploitation of the world's poorest people in an unending race to the bottom,' he wrote in an email. 'Fruit of the Loom is under extreme competitive pressure not only from other brands like Hanes and Gildan, but from retailers like Walmart and e-commerce giant Amazon, which knock off branded products and charge a hefty percentage for branded apparel sales in their stores or on their platforms. They have decided that the only way to deal with this pressure is by moving production to non-union factories in Morocco and Bangladesh. This move by Fruit of the Loom will result in the loss of employment by thousands of Honduran workers, in an economy that was already struggling.' And while the Washington Agreement doesn't explicitly prohibit factory closures or layoffs, Scott Nova, WRC's executive director, said he believes they violate the spirit of the deal, as exemplified by Jerzees Nuevo Dia. 'That factory was the doorway through which workers all across Honduras walked to substantially transform the industry,' he said. 'Honduras is the only country in the industry globally where the majority of workers are protected by genuine collective bargaining agreements. That all arises from that breakthrough.' That Fruit of the Loom has used the Honduras example to tout its leadership in social responsibility, generating a tremendous amount of goodwill, including from the U.S. government, makes the situation even more disappointing, Nova said. 'And so, while we understand the difficult realities of the industry and the challenges the company faces, in our view, they had a fundamental moral obligation to keep this factory going. The choice not to do so is extremely unfortunate and does not speak well of the company.'
