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Working Conditions

Employment Practices

On a global scale, Gildan favours permanent employment positions rather than temporary contracts.

There are many reasons for this practice:

• Optimize financial investment in employee training and development:
  • Training new employees involves a significant financial cost; therefore, Gildan is most interested in investing in people who will make a longer-term commitment to the Company for a long time
• Minimize the costs associated with the recruitment of new employees
• Ease of integrating permanent employees compared to temporary contractual employees into the Company’s culture and values

In some cases, hiring temporary employees is necessary, for instance:

• To work on a specific project (with a clear end date) assuming we do not have the capacity or expertise internally
• To fulfill temporary needs
• When experiencing a busier than normal workflow
• When it takes longer to find suitable permanent resources and someone is needed in the meantime
• Summer interns:
  • We believe it is important to offer students real-work experience which provides them with the opportunity to apply what they have learned in their studies.

• 2011 Gildan-owned facilities - Employees by contract type and by region

  	PERCENTAGE OF TEMPORARY CONTRACT EMPLOYEES	PERCENTAGE OF PERMANENT CONTRACT EMPLOYEES
  BANGLADESH	6.4%	93.6%
  BARBADOS	3.9%	96.1%
  CANADA	8.0%	92.0%
  DOMINICAN REPUBLIC	0.7%	99.3%
  HAITI*	2.4%	97.6%
  HONDURAS	0.5%	99.5%
  NICARAGUA	0.2%	99.8%
  UNITED STATES	0%	100%
  OTHER REGIONS (INCLUDING ASIA, EU)	0%	100%

  * Haiti: this information only includes Gildan employees working at our administrative office in Haiti which is responsible for monitoring Haitian contractors including compliance to our Code of Conduct. The employees of our contractors in Haiti are not included in this data.

  • A permanent employment contract is an employee contract for full-time or part-time work for an indeterminate period of time.
    
  • Temporary employment contract is defined as a fixed-term contract of employment that ends when a specific time period expires or when a specific task, which has a time estimate attached, is complete.

• 2011 Percentage of new employee hires by age group and gender within each region

  COUNTRY	AGE GROUP		GENDER
  	18-30 (%)	ABOVE AGE 30 (%)	FEMALE (%)	MALE (%)
  BARBADOS	46	54	85	15
  CANADA	36	64	53	47
  CENTRAL AMERICA	81	19	47	53
  DOMINICAN REPUBLIC	76	24	59	41
  UNITES STATES	36	64	45	55
  OTHER REGIONS	33	67	67	33

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  Providing Equal Opportunity

  In North America, we comply with equal-wage laws, such as the Quebec Employment Equity Act and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). In other regions, where no such laws exist we adhere to a policy of non-discrimination based on race, age, color, sex, religion, national origin, disability, citizenship status, and other protected classifications. This policy, in line with our Code of Conduct, clearly stipulates that no employee will be subject to any type of discrimination.