Every morning in America, children wake in warm sheeted beds,
changing from pajamas into clothes before they grab their
knapsacks and head out the door for school. Chances are that at
least one of those items - sheets, clothing, knapsack - is
emblazoned with a picture from a children's story or fairy tale
they love.
The mythic sagas of good and evil in which
children and the forces of good often triumph were first
translated to the movie screen by Walt Disney and his early band
of animators, giving children images to carry out of the movie
theaters and mentally hug at night when the dark got, well, just
too dark.
But it is the 1997 holiday season. Now children in other
countries, such as Haiti, labor in dark, dank conditions - often
behind metal gates and barbed wire, overseen by armed guards -
making 101 Dalmatians and Pocahontas toys and clothes for
American kids, whose parents routinely pay $20 for such items.
These young workers received six cents an hour in Haiti to
produce goods for a company under contract with the Disney
Corporation. After public exposure of the sweatshop there, the
company relocated to China, where workers make an average of 13
cents an hour, according to Charles Kernaghan, director of the
National Labor Committee (NLC), the New York City group
spearheading "The Holiday Season of Conscience" during
this year's holiday shopping frenzy.
Already, the national campaign to educate and motivate American
consumers not to buy sweatshop products has produced petition
drives, including high school and college students demanding that
their schools not purchase sweatshop items, and planned
activities around the country such as candlelight vigils,
"no-sweat" Santas and public sewing of economic justice
banners.
According to the latest figures from the International Labor
Organization (ILO), nearly 120 million children under the age of
14 spend their young lives working full time, while another 125
million kids are counted as part-time workers. Globally, nearly
61 percent of all child workers reside in Asia; about 80 million,
or 32 percent, are in Africa; and about 7 percent, or 17.5
million, are in Latin America.
"To have child labor means lower costs; because wages are
very low, children never complain, and they work long hours with
no overtime pay," said Oded Grajew, director and president
of the Abrinq Foundation for Children's Rights in Brazil, in an
interview with the Multinational Monitor.
Over 150,000 adult American workers have lost their jobs in the
clothing industry in recent years, as U.S. companies relocated to
parts of the world where governments both welcome and protect
corporations that profit off the backs of the countries' youngest
citizens. According to the American Textile Manufacturers
Institute, 60 percent of the $184 billion spent each year by
Americans on apparel purchases is for imports.
Over the last 15 years, free trade zones have become an
increasingly popular economic mechanism for America's
multinational corporations to manufacture goods elsewhere and
then ship back to the U.S. for sale, often paying little or no
tariffs in the manufacturing country or for importing back into
the U.S.
According to a 1995 report on textiles manufacturing in El
Salvador, "Free trade zones are areas constructed with the
express goal of providing an attractive investment package to
national and foreign export companies. Investors are provided the
necessary infrastructure (warehouses, electricity, water,
transportation, etc.) for a successful enterprise. Companies in
free trade zones in El Salvador enjoy a plethora of benefits
including exemption from taxes on imports, property and
assets."
That same report notes, "Most of the companies in El
Salvador's free trade zones are U.S. or Southeast Asian-owned
textile companiesÖ. According to the Central Reserve Bank,
textile exports grew by almost 50 percent in 1994 (totaling $431
million), 92 percent of which went to the U.S."
Little wonder that the United States now enjoys major debtor
status in the world's trade deficit. And while American workers
are rendered jobless and under-employed, company executives are
benefiting from increased profit margins. In the last 23 years,
the average pay of corporate executives has jumped from 34 times
the average American worker's salary to 180 times that wage,
according to Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy
Institute.
Corporations such as Nike, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, Gap, Disney,
Liz Claiborne and Levi Strauss reap millions in profits from
global maneuvering. "It's like checkers, you chase them
around the board," said the Rev. David Dyson, who founded
the NLC in 1981 and now heads "People of Faith," which
represents anti-sweatshop religious groups and consumer
organizations.
Many of the free trade zones, particularly in Asia and Central
America, have created sweatshop conditions that embody the worst
historical business practices. "If a product was made in a
free trade zone, it's likely to be a sweatshop product,"
said Ellen Braune of the National Labor Committee.
The 19th-century term "sweatshop" is used today to
again characterize corporate exploitation of child labor,
representing the most vulnerable part of a production process in
which work is sweated from the lowest tier of workers by
subcontractors who in turn contract with clothing or toy
manufacturers. There appears to be a convenient fluidness for
retail corporations concerning the identities of their
subcontractors. According to the Albion Monitor, this summer,
representatives from the posh Nordstrom's chain were quoted as
saying the company has 65,000 contractors and that contractors
change constantly, rendering monitoring of working conditions
impossible.
"Retailers and manufacturers at the top of the pyramid
dictate how much workers earn in wages by controlling the
contract price given to the contractor," according to the
group Sweatshop Watch. "With these prices declining each
year by as much as 25 percent, contractors are forced to 'sweat'
a profit from garment workers by working them long hours at low
wages."
A global economy has resulted in global production and price
competition, which according to several labor experts, is why
children make such a disposable and pliable workforce. According
to a recent report, "By the Sweat and Toil," by the
U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), "research shows that many
children are hired because they are more easily exploited than
adults. Employers prefer children because they are docile,
incapable of collective bargaining and willing to work to support
their families or simply to survive."
A major thrust to ending corporate exploitation of child labor is
that a living wage commensurate with a country's standard of
living should be paid to adult workers there, not children. For
example, garment workers receive the following average hourly
wages: Burma, 18 cents; China, 68 cents; El Salvador, $1.38;
Haiti, 49 cents; Honduras, $1.31; Indonesia, 34 cents; Mexico,
$1.08; Nicaragua, 76 cents; and Vietnam, 26 cents. However, those
paltry figures often mask the actual sums paid to child workers,
which are often even lower.
In February, Tony Vento, a Cleveland-based anti-sweatshop
activist and member of the InterReligious Task Force on Central
America, visited El Salvador with a group of Clevelanders. There
they found young female workers, most of whom were under the age
of 18, toiling in garment factories. "Eighty-five percent of
the young workers were the sole breadwinner for their
families," he said. "For the average family of five,
their monthly food budget for rice, beans, coffee, sugar and oil
is $132 a month. The average salary there for work weeks of up to
sixty hours is $129."
For Kernaghan of the NLC, "Living wages must be tied to the
basic cost of living in the societies. Companies can't hide
behind some minimum wage, there's no way getting paid 15 cents an
hour in Nicaragua or 30 cents an hour in Honduras is a living
wage. No one can live on this."
A factory life of low wages and long hours is producing whole
societies in which, "children are dying. There is
malnourishment, dysentery; women are aging," said Ellen
Braune of the NLC.
Often, young workers experience kidney problems because they are
forbidden to go to the bathroom, said Rev. Dyson. "There is
a tremendous amount of sexual harassment. They whack the girls
with the garments if they make a mistake. We see these very young
girls who can sew, who have forced overtime with regular shifts
of ten hours and when a big order comes in, they will have to
work two shifts."
It was the public spotlighting of abuse of young girls producing
her Wal-Mart clothing line at a Honduran sweatshop called Global
Fashion that moved television host Kathie Lee Gifford, whose show
is owned by Disney, to tears in 1996. "Don't cry for me,
Kathie Lee Gifford," said Dyson flatly. "For an
afternoon's work of approving sketches, okaying Wal-Mart and the
smiling face label, she was getting $10 million. She was making
more money off the clothing than the TV show."
Dyson emphasized it was only after several human rights groups
threatened Gifford with the legal action of discovery, which
would have forced public disclosure of her label's business
practices, that she was willing to meet with anti-sweatshop
activists. According to Dyson, because Kathie Lee and Archbishop
Cardinal O'Connor share the same publicist, a meeting was
arranged at the archbishop's residence with human rights'
activists, Kathie Lee and Wendy Diaz, a 15-year-old worker from
the Global Fashion plant. At the time, a joint statement was
issued indicating Gifford's expectation that Wal-Mart would
ensure that Global Fashion executives establish independent human
rights monitoring at the Honduran plant. Instead, according to a
recent NLC report, Wal-Mart pulled-up stakes in Honduras and
subcontracted work for its "Faded Glory" garments to
several factories in Nicaragua.
A Hard Copy investigation earlier this month reported that
Wal-Mart, along with J.C. Penney and Kmart, now had operations in
Nicaragua, where workers were paid a base wage of 15 cents an
hour, compared to the base rate of 31 cents an hour at Gifford's
production line in Honduras. Documented in that report were
workers' living conditions, housing made of huts with fabric
doors, tin or thatched roofs and cardboard walls. Also reported
was the common problem of corporate environmental pollution.
According to a release, "Bleaches, solvents and dyes are
washed into outdoor, open pits. Workers also complain that they
burn their hands with the bleach and chemicals used to make
stone-washed jeans."
Late last week, Kernaghan was fielding calls concerning reports
from Nicaragua that workers were being abused and harassed in
that Nicaraguan factory zone because of the television report.
One way to keep the spotlight on corporate conduct is through the
use of independent monitors, comprised of local religious and
human rights leaders who are known and trusted by an area's
workers. Both Dyson and Kernaghan point with pride to the
agreement struck in 1995 with The Gap Corporation's
Taiwanese-owned Mandarin factory in El Salvador, even though
according to an NLC reports The Gap has nearly twenty contractors
in Honduras, whose plants are not open to external monitoring.
The Gap does business with over 1,000 contractors in fifty
countries.
However, it is The Gap agreement that anti-sweatshop activists
cite as an example of a successful application of corporate codes
of conduct tied to external monitoring by religious and human
rights groups there. In 1995, workers at The Gap factory were
publicly documented through paycheck stubs and time cards as
being underage and working long hours in substandard conditions
for subsistent wages. "We conducted a nine-month campaign
there," said Dyson. "Because this was a coalition of
church and human rights groups, The Gap could not call us a
'special interest' as they were calling labor groups."
"Corporate codes of conduct on wages and working conditions
don't work by hiring external monitors such as Nike did in
Vietnam with Ernst and Young [an accounting firm]," said
Braune of the NLC. "If you have nothing to hide and really
want to be transparent, then use the religious rights and human
rights groups in those countries. Conditions have vastly improved
at The Gap plant in El Salvador; there is no forced overtime and
an actual dialogue has ensued."
It is the goal of the Holiday Season of Conscience, said
Kernaghan, to motivate American consumers to dialogue with
American corporations doing business in international sweatshops
staffed with child labor. "We don't call for boycotts, we
don't want to hurt these companies financially," said
Kernaghan. "We're asking people to sign the petition and
challenge these companies to do the right thing that we as
consumers don't want child labor in sweatshops."
The national petition drive started on October 4, the NLC's
"National Day of Conscience," to kickoff the holiday
shopping awareness campaign. Since then, Kernaghan said the
five-member NLC office has been overwhelmed by Americans'
response. "Hundreds of petitions are showing up every day.
It's almost too big for us," he said. "There are tons
from Kansas and Missouri. Cities I never heard of are sending us
petitions. We're getting them from nuns in California, first
graders writing in big block letters. The only thing driving this
is awareness of social pressure that people want to stop children
in sweatshops."
Several anti-child labor activists interviewed said the sweatshop
campaign is not only crucial to heighten the visibility of child
sweatshops during the profitable shopping season, but also to
leverage consumer pressure on the Apparel Industry Partnership,
which was formed April 14 by President Clinton in response to
media coverage and public outcry regarding Kathie Lee Gifford's
fracas and The Gap's business practices in El Salvador. The
18-member association is composed of representatives from groups
such as the National Consumers League, The Interfaith Center on
Corporate Responsibility, The International Labor Rights Fund and
America's textile workers' union - Union of Needletrades,
Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) - along with many of the
nation's top apparel executives.
Thus far, the partnership's voluntary guidelines for the
"Workplace Code of Conduct" issued by the group last
spring have been derided by many anti-child labor advocates
because the recommendations are not mandatory and do not tie a
living wage and non-use of child labor to external monitoring by
independent human rights groups. The agreement's current language
states: "No person shall be employed at an age younger than
15 (or 14 where the law of the country of manufacture allows)Ö
."
The group is to report to Clinton by December 31 on a final
agreement, which will be the first effort to establish
industry-wide human rights standards, according to NLC
literature.
As opposed to requiring a living wage be paid to overseas workers
employed or subcontracted by American corporations, the current
Workplace Codes encourage a minimum industry-mandated wage be
paid. "Codes of conduct won't mean anything if they are not
strengthened by a living wage in those countries," said
Kernaghan. According to the group Sweatshop Watch, in Indonesia,
the government itself has admitted that at the country's minimum
wage of $2.50 per day, a family could not meet its basic needs.
But, last spring, when "nearly 5000 Nike workers in
Indonesia were asking for a minimum wage of $2.50 a day, a Nike
spokesman complained that with these demands, 'Indonesia could be
reaching a point where it's pricing itself out of the
market.'"
Corporate representatives on the taskforce include Kathie Lee
Gifford, Philip Knight from Nike and employees from Liz
Claiborne. L.L. Bean Inc., Reebok International and Phillips-Van
Heusen. While the taskforce calls for external monitoring, the
language of its agreement makes corporate participation
voluntary, but as Kernaghan points out even that approach is
causing problems. "Two companies have already left Ö [from
participating in the code of conduct], Warnaco and Ellen
Tracy," he said. "They claimed they were doing it
because of the independent monitoring, they said the monitoring
was too threatening.
"Warnaco said that independent monitoring by religious
leaders and human rights groups would hurt the release of trade
secrets," he said. "I had to laugh. There are no trade
secrets here, they make women's underwear."
Perhaps fearing less of a Barbie doll pile under the Christmas
tree this year, Mattel Inc., the world's largest toy
manufacturer, announced its own code of conduct on November 20,
complete with external monitoring of all suppliers. Most Barbie
dolls are made in China, Indonesia and Malaysia. Last year,
Dateline NBC featured a report on 13-year-old girls making Barbie
dolls in an Indonesia toy factory for about $2 a day, according
to a New York Times report. Kenner, a subsidiary of the Hasbro
Toy company, maker of the popular "Magic School Bus"
items, also has numerous production facilities in China.
Several people interviewed said that well-funded corporate groups
with expert spin doctors are working even harder since the recent
defeat of Clinton's "Fast Track" legislation to ensure
multinational corporations are not restricted by codes and
monitoring.
For the anti-child labor supporters, the Holiday Season of
Conscience provides U.S. consumers with an opportunity to take a
position on products made for children, by children. "Once
the discussion involves human rights, the truth always
wins," said Kernaghan. "People have real power. We're
the biggest market in the world."
More Cleveland demonstrations
are planned on December 13 and December 20. Call the
InterReligious Task Force at 961-0003, UNITE at 621-8278 or Jobs
with Justice at 333-6363 for more information.