Due to social distancing measures and a decline in orders, many seats in garment factories are left empty. Photo: Ekaterina wage theft among the sample of cases for which we have been able to reach definitive findings, we project that 182 of these additional cases (86.8 percent) involve bona fide violations. Adding in estimates for workers affected and money owed for these additional cases, we arrive at a total estimate of 213 cases of severance theft among the factories in our data set, costing more than 160,000 workers an estimated $171.5 million. This estimate reflects only the confirmed and likely severance violations among 400 garment factories where the WRC has been able to identify a factory closure or mass dismissal. These are cases where news of job loss has been brought to light through reports from unions or other civil society organizations, or through local media coverage, or because unpaid workers have brought a complaint. These cases represent only a modest fraction of the total number of closures and large-scale dismissals over the last 12 months across the entire garment industry. Indeed, comparing aggregate country-level data on factory closures and job loss from credible sources to the WRC’s data set indicates that the 400 cases identified by the WRC represent no more than 10 percent of the global total of factories that have closed or shed a substantial number of workers. Even making the reasonable assumption that cases where severance has gone unpaid are substantially over-represented in our sample of factories, since it is partly generated by worker complaints, this means pandemic-era severance WRC yz Fired, Then Robbed zy Page 2