Hiding in the fields - farm workers fearing deportation stay in California's shadows
"Are you from ICE?" one of the women, a farm worker in a hat and purple bandana, asks us fearfully.
After assuring her that we're not with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has been raiding nearby farms and arresting workers over the past week, she straightens her back, rising slightly out of the dirt.
"Have you seen any ICE vans? Are there patrol cars out there?" she asks, still unsure if we can be trusted and she can emerge.
The woman, an undocumented migrant from Mexico, has been picking berries in Oxnard, California since arriving in the US two years ago. It's a town which boasts of being the "strawberry capital of the world".
As her work shift ended on Wednesday, she and her co-workers hid in the fields, waiting to be picked up by a friend and unsure whether it was safe to venture out into the parking lot.
On the previous day, nine farms in the Oxnard area were visited by ICE agents, say local activists, but without search warrants they were denied entry and instead picked up people on the nearby streets, arresting 35.
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The workplace raids are part of President Donald Trump's goal of arresting 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day. On the campaign trail he had vowed to deport noncitizens accused of violent crimes, a promise that received widespread support, even among some Hispanics.
But in Los Angeles there was a public backlash and street protests that sometimes turned violent, prompting him to controversially send in the military to the second largest city in the US.
"They treat us like criminals, but we only came here to work and have a better life," says the woman, who left her children behind in Mexico two years ago and hopes to return to them next year.
"We don't want to leave the house anymore. We don't want to go to the store. We're afraid they'll catch us."
Large-scale raids on workplaces in California's agricultural heartland haven't been seen for the last 15 years, says Lucas Zucker, a community organiser in California's Central Coast region.
But that seems to have changed this past week.
"They are just sweeping through immigrant communities like Oxnard indiscriminately, looking for anyone they can find to meet their politically-driven quotas," he says.
More than 40% of US farmworkers are undocumented immigrants, according to a 2022 report by the US Department of Agriculture. In California, more than 75% are undocumented, according to the University of California, Merced.
Raids at farms and businesses that rely on the agricultural industry throughout California, and across the entire country, have ramped up this month.
The arrests have raised fears of shortages to America's food supply, if the migrants are arrested or forced into hiding, afraid to come to work.
This impact has not been lost on the White House. Despite winning the election decisively after promising mass deportations, Trump on Thursday acknowledged the tough time his crackdown is inflicting on the farming sector.
"Our farmers are being hurt badly. You know, they have very good workers. They've worked for them for 20 years. They're not citizens, but they've turned out to be, you know, great."
Who has been arrested by ICE under Trump?
In April, he said that some migrants may be authorised to continue working in the US, on the condition that they have a formal recommendation from their employer and that they first leave the US.
The result of one raid on Tuesday in Oxnard, a municipality 60 miles (100km) from downtown Los Angeles, can be seen in a video posted to Instagram by a local flower merchant.
The short clip shows a man running in a vast field of crops, through a haze of thick morning fog, as agents give chase on foot and in trucks. He is then seen falling to the ground, among the rows of plants, as agents move to arrest him.
When the BBC visited Oxnard on Wednesday, a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) truck was seen parked outside an organic produce trucking company. A security guard insisted their visit was not related to immigration, saying: "This is not ICE. We would never let ICE in here."
Many tractors and trucks sat idle surrounded by acres of farmland, as an unknown number of workers chose to stay home.
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Jesus polished luxury cars in LA - then ICE showed up
The impact is having ripple effects on other businesses. Watching from her family's Mexican restaurant, Raquel Pérez saw masked CBP agents attempt to enter Boskovich Farms, a vegetable and herb packing facility across the street.
Now her business, Casa Grande Cafe, has only one customer during the normally busy lunch hour, because farm workers have stayed home. She estimates that at least half of her normal clientele are undocumented.
"No one came in today," says her mother, Paula Pérez. "We're all on edge."
Raquel says she's more concerned now for the future of the restaurant - serving chilaquiles, flan, and other Mexican delicacies - than she was during Covid, when her customers continued their work as usual, keeping the nation supplied with fresh foods.
"They don't realise the domino effect this is going to have," she says about the raids. Other companies around her that rely on agriculture have already been affected. The adjacent business buying and selling wooden pallets is closed, and a local car mechanic too.
"If the strawberries or vegetables aren't picked, that means there's gonna be nothing coming into the packing houses. Which means there's not gonna be no trucks to take the stuff."
A migrant selling strawberries from his truck on the side of the road says the raids have already had a devastating effect - on both his business and his hopes of becoming a legal resident of the US.
"Fewer people are going out for trips, and they buy less from me," says Óscar, who comes from the Mexican state of Tlaxcala and, while undocumented himself, has children who were born in the US.
"I'm scared, but I can't stop going out to work. I have to provide for my family," he says.
Óscar says he has been working to finalise his immigration status, but with ICE agents now waiting outside courthouses for migrants seeking to process paperwork, he's unsure of what to do next.
"There aren't many ways left to be here legally."
'Un-American' or 'necessary'? Voters divided on Trump's LA protest crackdown
How Trump's immigration raids sparked protests and unrest
Newsom v Trump holds promise and peril for California governor
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Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Yahoo
As Trump's tariff deadline looms, a clothing factory in the tiny African nation of Lesotho goes dark
MASERU, Lesotho (AP) — The deafening roar of hundreds of sewing machines has gone silent. Spools of thread in every color are covered in dust. The warehouse is dark and empty. In the tiny African nation of Lesotho, clothing manufacturer Tzicc's business has dried up in the face of tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration. A few months ago, work was steady. The factory's 1,300 employees has made and exported sportswear to American stores, including JCPenney, Walmart and Costco. But when Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners in April, Lesotho found itself topping the list, with a rate of 50% — higher even than that of China, where the economy is 8,000 times larger. Officials here and economic experts said they were baffled. Since then, Trump backed off — temporarily. During a monthslong pause for trade talks, the U.S. has charged a baseline 10% tariff and announced new rates for dozens of countries starting Friday. Lesotho's rate will be set at Trump's whim, with aides suggesting that tariffs charged on goods from smaller African countries could top 10%. Many nations have received letters laying out a new tariff. With the pause set to expire Friday, Lesotho officials say they've not received one and they find themselves among the countries where Trump says officials simply don't have time for one-on-one negotiations. Leaders — and the 12,000 people employed by garment factories exporting to the U.S. market — are still waiting. The damage has already rippled through Lesotho's economy, where textile manufacturing comprises the largest private industry with more than 30,000 workers in 2024. For Tzicc and its customers, the threat and apparent singling out of Lesotho were enough. Management decided to rush to deliver preexisting orders before tariffs resumed. But American buyers stopped placing new orders. With no work left, virtually all the factory's employees were sent home — potentially permanently. 'Well, unfortunately, we finished,' factory compliance manager Rahila Omar said, pointing out the irony of the strategy as she walked among rows of silenced and covered machines. 'That is why now we don't have any work.' Omar is one of a handful of employees left in the eerily quiet factory. A few remain in the accounting department; others empty leftover stock to a warehouse elsewhere. Officials and workers fear this may be a sign of what's to come for other factories in Lesotho, where poverty is widespread among the population of 2 million and most textile workers single-handedly support their families. Lesotho's tiny economy was threatened with giant tariffs In March, a month before slapping Lesotho with the 50% tariff, Trump described it as a place 'nobody has ever heard of," struggling to pronounce the nation's name in a speech criticizing U.S. foreign aid. It's true Lesotho is a 'very minuscule economy," as its own trade minister, Mokhethi Shelile, described it. But its relationship with Washington dates back decades. The U.S. was the first country to open an embassy in the capital, Maseru, after Lesotho declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1966. The military received U.S. training, and hundreds of millions in U.S. funds were sent to Lesotho to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic via the now defunctUSAID office and the PEPFAR program. As textiles grew to become Lesotho's main export, some 75% of its product went to the U.S. Lesotho became known as Africa's denim capital. If an American purchased jeans from a U.S. brand such as Wrangler or Levi's, they may have been 'Made in Lesotho,' as tags still note. In 2000, the U.S. signed the African Growth and Opportunity Act, allowing Lesotho and other African nations to export goods to the U.S. duty free. Shelile said he was in the process of negotiating AGOA's September renewal when he was awakened in the middle of the night by texts from aides bearing news of the 50% U.S. tariffs. 'No, this cannot be real,' Shelile remembers thinking. 'What did we do to deserve this?' According to the Trump administration, Lesotho charges a 99% tariff on U.S. goods. The government here said it doesn't know how the U.S. calculated that. In theory, the tariff decision was based on trade deficit: Lesotho's exports to the U.S. were around $240 million last year — mainly clothing and diamonds — and imports from the U.S. were only $2.8 million. But in practice, the math is more complicated than that. And in reality, Lesotho simply cannot afford to import more U.S. products. Nearly half the population lives below the poverty line. 'The trade deficit that exists between Lesotho and the U.S. is a natural trade deficit that can happen when you have these types of disparities between two economies," Shelile said. "It cannot be breached and certainly cannot be breached by imposing tariffs.' Lesotho declared a state of emergency over unemployment Last year, Lesotho's overall unemployment rate was about 30%, national data shows. For those 35 and younger, it was nearly 50%. The threat of tariffs has exacerbated the national unemployment troubles, prompting the government to declare a state of disaster this month. 'No matter how we slice it, we've already had a lot of losses," Shelile said. "People have lost quite a lot money. And to claw back and come back to where we were before this is going to take time.' Most of the 12,000 people hired by Lesotho's 11 factories exporting to the U.S. are women with children to feed and school fees to pay. Of those, 9,000 jobs are directly in the line of fire and an additional 40,000 will suffer indirectly from the U.S.-imposed tariffs, Shelile said. 'We're talking people in real estate that are leasing some rooms,' he said. 'We're talking people in transport, whether it's long-distance haulage to the port, or it is a taxi driver taking people to work in the morning. They are going be affected.' Mapontso Mathunya used to work on Tzicc's cutting room floor and is now unemployed. Her husband also is out of a steady job. With two young children, Mathunya was the family's breadwinner. She now tries to sell snacks and cigarettes on the street but finds it a daily struggle to bring home even a few cents. 'Our financial burden has been heavy," she said. 'Things are bad.' The future of this factory and others remains in limbo The future of the Tzicc factory depends on what happens Friday, compliance manager Omar said. Owned by a Taiwanese national, the factory has been open since mid-1999. In a peak month, it made up to 1.5 million pieces of clothing for JCPenney. Key U.S. customers for Tzicc — JCPenney, Walmart and Costco — did not reply to AP to comment. Pivoting to the neighboring South African market, one of the solutions proposed by the trade minister and industry consultants, wouldn't be enough to even cover the employees' payroll, Omar said. And even if American buyers return, it's unlikely the factory could rehire all its 1,300 workers, she added. Today, just a few blocks away, former employees try their luck looking for work at other factories that are still operating. Most are turned away. 'Life is difficult,' former worker Mathunya said. 'There is nothing, nothing at all. People don't have money.' __ Pascalinah Kabi in Maseru, Josh Boak in Washington and Anne D'Innocenzio in New York contributed. ___ For more on Africa and development: The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at Renata Brito, The Associated Press
Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Harvard Created Windfall From Bringing Executives Back to School
(Bloomberg) -- Harvard University is drawing an increasing share of its revenue from helping businesspeople beef up their résumés, giving America's oldest institution of higher learning a lifeline as it confronts its largest-ever crisis. The World's Data Center Capital Has Residents Surrounded An Abandoned Art-Deco Landmark in Buffalo Awaits Revival Budapest's Most Historic Site Gets a Controversial Rebuild San Francisco in Talks With Vanderbilt for Downtown Campus Boston's Dumpsters Overflow as Trash-Strike Summer Drags On Years before the Trump administration halted billions of dollars in federal funding over allegations of antisemitism, discrimination and a lack of differing viewpoints on campus, the wealthiest US university had been putting a greater emphasis on professional and executive education. Executives looking to step up their management skills or get up to speed on new technology have eagerly shelled out for expensive in-person and online courses at the storied university out of their own pockets, or with help from their employers. Those programs are now providing Harvard with revenue that's relatively insulated from US President Donald Trump's efforts to deprive Harvard of federal funds — and helping soften the blow as administrators watch expenses rise, endowment returns sag and donations drop. Overall, executive education and continuing education for nontraditional students delivered nearly $600 million last year, up from $155 million two decades ago, publicly available data from the university shows. Alumni of Harvard's undergraduate and graduate programs have sometimes scoffed at such programs, posting memes to social media implying that they lack Ivy League gravitas. (Along with executive education, Harvard also offers programs for lifelong learners and students seeking a nontraditional path to a degree). But putting the Harvard imprimatur on classes that let corporate managers burnish their bona fides and expand their networks is providing the embattled university with an important safety net at an uncertain time for US colleges and universities. The Trump administration has attempted to squeeze Harvard financially, including by freezing more than $2.6 billion in federal research funding and trying to end its tax-exempt status. It has also sought to bar enrollment of foreign students, who frequently pay full tuition. The university has been in talks with administration officials about a possible settlement, though the details and timing of a potential deal remain uncertain. The proceeds from continuing and executive education programs accounted for 9% of Harvard's $6.5 billion operating revenue base in 2024, its financial report shows. By comparison, federal research money accounted for 11%. The programs made up 42% of the school's net tuition and fee revenue in 2024, up from 26% in 2005. Harvard's nondegree courses range from short-term certificate programs to in-person, long-term training for executives and senior professionals. They can bring in anywhere from several hundred dollars to more than $10,000 per student. One multiyear Harvard Business School program can cost as much as $150,000. Harvard gives generous financial aid to many of its undergraduates. The tax law signed by Trump this month limits borrowing by graduate students. But many continuing and executive education students aren't reliant on loans or other federal assistance to pay their expenses. Companies can pick up the tab for employees, and in some cases veterans are eligible for tuition assistance under the GI Bill. Billionaire Backers Executive education has also lured funds from another core Harvard constituency: billionaires with their names adorning a building. Tata Hall is named in honor of Indian industrialist Ratan Tata, who died in 2024, and attended Harvard's Advanced Management Program, which prepares executives for leadership roles, in the 1970s. Tata Companies and other philanthropic entities gave Harvard Business School $50 million to construct the 150,000-square-foot building, which was completed in 2013. Brazilian Andre Esteves, cofounder and chairman of Brazil-based investment giant Banco BTG Pactual SA, and his wife funded the renovation of a residence hall for executive education bearing his name at Harvard Business School. Esteves, who didn't earn a degree from the school, has also financed scholarships for Brazilian students. Representatives for Tata and Esteves declined to comment. Executive education was the second-biggest source of revenue at Harvard Business School last year, bringing in $245 million. Online education fetched another $70 million. The business school has about 42,000 executive education students enrolled on the web, more than double the level in 2019. Harvard's professional education programs have a large and increasing number of international students. Roughly 70% of Harvard Business School's 12,000 executive education students hail from abroad — a big selling point for many who enroll. In May, Raoul-Gabreil Urma, the founder of an education-technology business who lives in the UK, finished a multiyear program with three on-campus components called 'Owner/President Management' that costs about $150,000. He also took a course that will prepare him to serve on corporate boards. 'It's lonely being a business owner and CEO,' Urma said. It's one of the only programs 'that brings a world-class international community together to learn together and share challenges.' Trump's efforts to keep Harvard from enrolling foreign students could upend that appeal. Yet the growing number of elite US colleges and universities offering executive education programs are banking on continued demand at home and abroad. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the University of Virginia and other schools are marketing such programs online and on social media like LinkedIn. Virginia's Darden School of Business offers lifelong learning and executive education for individuals and organizations including the military and government agencies. Participants can stay at a new on-campus Kimpton hotel owned by the Darden School foundation. The school has also expanded in the Washington, DC, area to meet rising demand from working professionals. Columbia's business school offers a nine-to-12 month program for chief financial officers that can cost up to $30,000. MIT is creating a private, not-for-profit educational institution through a network of campuses around the US for in-person and digital classes. The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business created a campus in San Francisco in 2001 that now includes executive and other education. At Northwestern University, the Kellogg School of Management delivered about 350 continuing education programs to more than 22,000 participants in fiscal 2024, its highest demand ever. The Chicago-area school plans to aggressively invest in development of more, including a dozen new programs to market over the next six months, said Thomas O'Toole, associate dean for executive programs. To expand their global footprint, dozens of schools, including Wharton, Kellogg and Harvard Medical School, collaborate with a Singapore-based company called Emeritus Education for short courses, degree programs, executive and certificate programs. Expansion Plans Along with its business-school programs, Harvard offers executive and continuing education through its medical, law and public health schools, as well as the Kennedy School of Government. On its website, the Kennedy School describes dozens of executive programs, including a six-day, on-campus cybersecurity certificate program that costs $11,300 (an online version of the course is priced at $5,100). For years, the US government had paid Harvard for courses and other services in which senior employees, including military and defense officials, updated their credentials. Those payments peaked at about $4.4 million in fiscal year 2023, according to Bloomberg Government data. Harvard's US government contracts have been frozen amid Trump's efforts to clamp federal funds flowing to the university. In June, Harvard's TH Chan School of Public Health tapped Rifat Atun, a physician and global health-systems expert, as a new vice dean for non-degree education and innovation. In that role, Atun will look to bring in more money through new certificate programs, short courses and executive education. Last year, Chan drew almost 60% of its revenue from federal research money, and it has been forced to make cuts as Trump tightens the spigots. To fill the gap, continuing education can bring in thousands of dollars for programs that run for less time than a traditional academic semester. For example, the school advertised on LinkedIn this summer for a five- to six-month online leadership program that cost $14,000 before any discounts. Atun has taught professional-education courses ranging from leadership classes for nurses to custom courses for employees of global drug and medical-device companies. 'This is an opportunity to rethink and expand, building on the strength of what is being provided and better understand the needs of current and potential customers and the segments we serve,' he said in an interview. Chan plans to grow its professional education efforts to Latin America and the Middle East, Atun said. Other parts of Harvard are also expanding their continuing-education menu. New offerings in the year that begins this fall at the Harvard Extension School include microcertificates in AI-related topics and new online graduate certificates that can be 'stacked' toward a master's degree. Continuing and executive education is expected to be more lucrative than other efforts the university has made to expand access to its academic offerings, such as an earlier experiment with free online courses for students who didn't earn credit or a degree. Online education was conceived as a free good, said Peter Bol, a Harvard professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and a former vice provost responsible for online learning. 'Obviously it was a money loser,' Bol said. 'Executive education was not.' --With assistance from Alexander McIntyre, Mathieu Benhamou and Tom Contiliano. (Corrects Andre Esteves title in 12th paragraph.) It's Not Just Tokyo and Kyoto: Tourists Descend on Rural Japan Burning Man Is Burning Through Cash Everyone Loves to Hate Wind Power. Scotland Found a Way to Make It Pay Off Cage-Free Eggs Are Booming in the US, Despite Cost and Trump's Efforts Russia Builds a New Web Around Kremlin's Handpicked Super App ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Washington Post
15 minutes ago
- Washington Post
As Trump's tariff deadline looms, a clothing factory in the tiny African nation of Lesotho goes dark
MASERU, Lesotho — The deafening roar of hundreds of sewing machines has gone silent. Spools of thread in every color are covered in dust. The warehouse is dark and empty. In the tiny African nation of Lesotho , clothing manufacturer Tzicc's business has dried up in the face of tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration . A few months ago, work was steady. The factory's 1,300 employees has made and exported sportswear to American stores, including JCPenney, Walmart and Costco. But when Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners in April, Lesotho found itself topping the list , with a rate of 50% — higher even than that of China , where the economy is 8,000 times larger. Officials here and economic experts said they were baffled. Since then, Trump backed off — temporarily. During a monthslong pause for trade talks, the U.S. has charged a baseline 10% tariff and announced new rates for dozens of countries starting Friday. Lesotho's rate will be set at Trump's whim, with aides suggesting that tariffs charged on goods from smaller African countries could top 10% . Many nations have received letters laying out a new tariff. With the pause set to expire Friday, Lesotho officials say they've not received one and they find themselves among the countries where Trump says officials simply don't have time for one-on-one negotiations. Leaders — and the 12,000 people employed by garment factories exporting to the U.S. market — are still waiting. The damage has already rippled through Lesotho's economy, where textile manufacturing comprises the largest private industry with more than 30,000 workers in 2024. For Tzicc and its customers, the threat and apparent singling out of Lesotho were enough. Management decided to rush to deliver preexisting orders before tariffs resumed. But American buyers stopped placing new orders. With no work left, virtually all the factory's employees were sent home — potentially permanently. 'Well, unfortunately, we finished,' factory compliance manager Rahila Omar said, pointing out the irony of the strategy as she walked among rows of silenced and covered machines. 'That is why now we don't have any work.' Omar is one of a handful of employees left in the eerily quiet factory. A few remain in the accounting department; others empty leftover stock to a warehouse elsewhere. Officials and workers fear this may be a sign of what's to come for other factories in Lesotho, where poverty is widespread among the population of 2 million and most textile workers single-handedly support their families. In March, a month before slapping Lesotho with the 50% tariff, Trump described it as a place 'nobody has ever heard of," struggling to pronounce the nation's name in a speech criticizing U.S. foreign aid. It's true Lesotho is a 'very minuscule economy,' as its own trade minister, Mokhethi Shelile, described it. But its relationship with Washington dates back decades. The U.S. was the first country to open an embassy in the capital, Maseru, after Lesotho declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1966. The military received U.S. training, and hundreds of millions in U.S. funds were sent to Lesotho to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic via the now defunctUSAID office and the PEPFAR program. As textiles grew to become Lesotho's main export, some 75% of its product went to the U.S. Lesotho became known as Africa's denim capital. If an American purchased jeans from a U.S. brand such as Wrangler or Levi's, they may have been 'Made in Lesotho,' as tags still note. In 2000, the U.S. signed the African Growth and Opportunity Act, allowing Lesotho and other African nations to export goods to the U.S. duty free. Shelile said he was in the process of negotiating AGOA's September renewal when he was awakened in the middle of the night by texts from aides bearing news of the 50% U.S. tariffs. 'No, this cannot be real,' Shelile remembers thinking. 'What did we do to deserve this?' According to the Trump administration, Lesotho charges a 99% tariff on U.S. goods. The government here said it doesn't know how the U.S. calculated that. In theory, the tariff decision was based on trade deficit: Lesotho's exports to the U.S. were around $240 million last year — mainly clothing and diamonds — and imports from the U.S. were only $2.8 million. But in practice, the math is more complicated than that. And in reality, Lesotho simply cannot afford to import more U.S. products. Nearly half the population lives below the poverty line. 'The trade deficit that exists between Lesotho and the U.S. is a natural trade deficit that can happen when you have these types of disparities between two economies,' Shelile said. 'It cannot be breached and certainly cannot be breached by imposing tariffs.' Last year, Lesotho's overall unemployment rate was about 30%, national data shows. For those 35 and younger, it was nearly 50%. The threat of tariffs has exacerbated the national unemployment troubles, prompting the government to declare a state of disaster this month. 'No matter how we slice it, we've already had a lot of losses,' Shelile said. 'People have lost quite a lot money. And to claw back and come back to where we were before this is going to take time.' Most of the 12,000 people hired by Lesotho's 11 factories exporting to the U.S. are women with children to feed and school fees to pay. Of those, 9,000 jobs are directly in the line of fire and an additional 40,000 will suffer indirectly from the U.S.-imposed tariffs, Shelile said. 'We're talking people in real estate that are leasing some rooms,' he said. 'We're talking people in transport, whether it's long-distance haulage to the port, or it is a taxi driver taking people to work in the morning. They are going be affected.' Mapontso Mathunya used to work on Tzicc's cutting room floor and is now unemployed. Her husband also is out of a steady job. With two young children, Mathunya was the family's breadwinner. She now tries to sell snacks and cigarettes on the street but finds it a daily struggle to bring home even a few cents. 'Our financial burden has been heavy,' she said. 'Things are bad.' The future of the Tzicc factory depends on what happens Friday, compliance manager Omar said. Owned by a Taiwanese national, the factory has been open since mid-1999. In a peak month, it made up to 1.5 million pieces of clothing for JCPenney. Key U.S. customers for Tzicc — JCPenney, Walmart and Costco — did not reply to AP to comment. Pivoting to the neighboring South African market, one of the solutions proposed by the trade minister and industry consultants, wouldn't be enough to even cover the employees' payroll, Omar said. And even if American buyers return, it's unlikely the factory could rehire all its 1,300 workers, she added. Today, just a few blocks away, former employees try their luck looking for work at other factories that are still operating. Most are turned away. 'Life is difficult,' former worker Mathunya said. 'There is nothing, nothing at all. People don't have money.' __ Pascalinah Kabi in Maseru, Josh Boak in Washington and Anne D'Innocenzio in New York contributed. ___ For more on Africa and development: The Associated Press receives financial support for global health and development coverage in Africa from the Gates Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at .
