LC Waikiki, a fast-growing Turkish apparel company, opens another new store in Tbilisi. Poorly paid workers in the Georgian city of Kutaisi produce LC Waikiki clothing.
By Nino Bakradze
You don’t have to go to Southeast Asia to find sweatshops where workers toil under harsh conditions to make clothing for rich Western consumers. A reporter for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) posing as a textile worker found such conditions in the Republic of Georgia.
Conditions are ripe for abuse in the country of 4-plus million which has no separate labor ministry, no labor inspectors, and an embarrassingly low minimum wage, yet OCCRP found two Kutaisi textile factories that manage to break what labor laws do exist.