A small company Nien Hsing Textile was founded in 1986 as a producer of various types of denim. By those measures, it is smaller than all but a handful of Wisconsin's publicly traded companies. The workers at Chentex make 22,000 pairs of jeans each day for shipment to Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target, J.C. Penney and Kohl's. Chentex is one of several plants that supplies Kohl's Sonoma-brand jeans. The National Labor Committee has piled many allegations on Chentex, listing them on fliers being passed out at some Kohl's stores.
Workers have been fired illegally, the fliers say.
They have been yelled at and even hit, denied free access to bathrooms, and made to work overtime against their will, the committee contends. When the allegations surfaced in August, Kohl's responded by hiring PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm, to investigate conditions at the plant. Kohl's subsequently asked Chentex to correct a few minor problems. Things such as restrooms in disrepair, fire extinguishers not properly maintained or marked, and hazardous materials not properly labeled or stored have been corrected, company spokeswoman Susan Henderson said. It was crowded but reasonably clean inside Chentex, although lint dust from the acres of denim in the plant irritated eyes and noses.