Brain tumour killed worker, says garment export firm

Brain tumour killed worker, says garment export firm
Web posted at: 10/17/2014 0:41:16
Source ::: AFP
Peninsula On-line, Qatar

BANGALORE • An Indian woman whose death while working for a supplier for clothing giant Gap sparked the retailer’s concern and union anger died of a brain tumour, her employer said yesterday.

Samir Goenka, owner of Bangalore-based Texport Overseas, said he had just received the report on an autopsy conducted on Padmavathi, 39, which determined she suffered a “natural death due to brain tuberculoma.”

“Only God could have saved her,” Goenka said in a telephone interview.

Together with an e-mailed statement, the company enclosed copies of the autopsy report on Padmavathi.

Padmavathi, employed at a Texport unit, collapsed and died last month after she was kept waiting for leave to visit a doctor, unions and press reports have said.

Workplace standards at factories are monitored by international unions and fashion retailers which sub-contract manufacturing to countries such as India, China and Indonesia to tap plentiful labour and lower costs.

Gap told the Indian company to enhance its “internal human resource systems” and submit to an “additional investigation of its workplace practices,” after the incident, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.

The International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation condemned the incident, which it said resembled the case of a worker at the same factory who lost the baby son she delivered on a street when refused immediate leave.

Texport said Padmavathi had fallen in a factory toilet on September 18 after feeling giddy. The nurse advised the worker to rest and she applied for four days’ leave that was immediately granted, the company said.

Padmavathi then collapsed on a footpath about half-a-kilometre away, and bystanders called the factory after seeing her identity card, Texport said. A staff nurse then took her to a hospital where she died.

The garment maker also said the employee whose baby died had resumed work at the factory, and enclosed a report from a family counselling centre that investigated the case.

The employee, identified as Rathnamma, had not revealed earlier to the company that she was pregnant with her third child, said the centre.