II. History of Severance Theft in Brand Supply Chains and Efforts to Achieve Remedy Wage theft associated with closure of factories and other large-scale dismissals of workers, in the form of failure to pay legally required severance, is pervasive and longstanding in the global apparel industry. Because severance theft impacts workers at the very moment when they have lost their source of income and because the amounts unpaid are usually equivalent to at least several months of workers’ wages, the impact on workers and their families is often devastating. Causes of Severance Theft and Its Harm to Workers The impact of severance theft on garment workers is severely exacerbated by the sourcing strategies employed by major apparel brands over the past several decades. As advances in logistics and information technology have enabled brands to continually shift production to countries with lower wages, the industry’s labor force has been increasingly comprised of workers who live Former Industrias Florenzi employees stand guard in front of the closed factory in Soyapango, El Salvador. Photo: Emerson Flores/Gato Encerrado (CC BY-NC 4.0)