WORKERS at a factory in Turkey supplying global jeans brand Levi Strauss have been subjected to intimidation and violence, according to a study by a labour rights monitoring organisation.

The US-based Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) published a report today detailing its investigation into the working conditions at a factory owned by the Ozak Global in Sanliurfa — about 400 miles south-east of capital city Ankara — which produces the Levi’s famous red tab jeans.

The report accuses Ozak Global, the provincial security forces and the company’s favoured union, of having been complicit in “violence, arrests and retaliatory mass firings against roughly 400 workers, after the majority of the facility’s workforce chose to join an independent union” since last November.