By Myo Thein - Sep 29, 2025
Workers at Grand Forest garment factory say management is threatening and coercing them into working overtime. The threats come from supervisors, assistant supervisors, technical staff, managers, and the HR department according to the workers.
“They said they’ll cut our daily wage, grade us poorly, or tell us not to come to work if we don’t do overtime. These threats come from all of them; assistant supervisors, supervisors, the male technical staff, the manager, and the female HR officer. They even force us to sign reprimends,” a worker said.
Workers say they are losing more than 100,000 MMK whenever they refuse to work overtime as the attendance bonus is 30,000 MMK and the highest performance grade can result in bonuses up to 100,000 MMK. Workers from Lines 4, 7, 10, and 11 also said that assistant supervisors verbally abuse them when performance targets are not met.
“They pressure us in the office to make sure we meet the targets. They yell and scream at us to the point we can’t concentrate. The way they insult female workers includes sexist and demeaning language,” workers reported.
Workers also said that toilet access is limited and exceeding the allotted break time results in written warnings. The factory also restricts access to drinking water.
“We're only given 3 minutes to use the toilet. If we take longer, we have to sign a warning letter. There’s barely any drinking water. Sometimes, we go days without it. This is especially hard for pregnant workers,” they said.
Workers are required to work until midnight three days a week, work every Saturday, and take turns working Sundays. Workers say their total working hours aren’t clearly reflected since overtime payments are settled separately and not listed on the main payslip.
“They only recorded 79 hours of overtime in last month. That’s just under 80 hours. But in reality, we worked more than 100 hours. Working like that has affected our health,” said one worker.
Even though some workers have fainted inside the factory, the emergency medical supplies are reportedly inadequate. There is also no support system in place when incidents occur.
“Doing all this overtime has affected our health. Fainting at the workplace has become common. There’s only one type of basic medicine in the emergency kit. If someone needs to go to the clinic, other workers have to escort them. There’s no wage deduction, but there’s also no support at all,” a worker said.
Grand Forest International Apparel is located at the corner of Sayarsan Road and Sin Phyu Road, Ywarthargyi Industrial Zone, Dagon Seikkan Township, Yangon Region.
