National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #49-98 Behind Brand Names: U.S. Companies and Foreign Labor
December 9, 1998

Program description at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/1998/9849.html

Phillip Babich: Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas, and important information. This week, on Making Contact -

Charles Kernaghan: The women sewing the Liz Claiborne jackets told us that they frequently went to bed hungry -them and their families. And one thing they tried to do was collect- if they could pull together like 28 cents, they could have a supper of tortillas and eggs. So that would be their supper.

Marina Rios (via translator): Imagine just what they have to do. They have to complement this income with all kinds of other activities, such as prostitution and participation in informal markets.

Phillip Babich: The Gap, Eddie Bauer, Wal-Mart, J.C. Penny... virtually every brand name you can think of in the garment industry has a tale of harsh working conditions behind it. On this program, you’ll hear a few of those stories as we take a look at the labor that goes into popular clothing lines. Also, we examine the role of international trade policies which allow multinational corporations to pay starvation wages to workers in some countries. And, you’ll hear what some activists in the United States are doing to fight back. I’m Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact.

Some of us flip over clothing labels when we’re shopping to see where a particular item was manufactured. We may wonder whether the country of origin is in support of human rights or whether the worker who made that shirt or pair of pants was paid fairly. But, knowing the country of origin only tells us part of the story. Information on specific manufacturing facilities abroad is hard to come by. And, U.S.-based corporations are not required to disclose records on foreign operations. Despite enormous obstacles, some organizations have managed to expose a handful of garment factories that maintain abysmal working conditions and pay substandard wages while cranking out brand name goods for multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies.

One such plant is Mandarin International, management for this El Salvador-based facility cracked down on 850 workers -mostly women- who were trying to win union rights in the early 1990’s. At the time, Mandarin International was making clothes for The Gap, J.C. Penny, and Eddie Bauer. Reverend David Dyson of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian church in Brooklyn, New York, is founder of the People of Faith Network. He has visited Mandarin International, which is owned by a Taiwanese company, on several occasions and is working to reform its practices.

Reverend David Dyson: The conditions there, first of all, were hot and cramped and the most egregious thing that struck me, first of all, was that the security force for the plant was being headed up by this guy who’s name was Anaya and I had remembered Colonel Anaya from the war. This guy was a death squad leader. This guy was a roving executioner, mostly of innocent people who had political beliefs back then. So, there was this reign of terror in this plant. Girls were beaten. There were reports of the girls being forced to take oral contraceptives and there were further reports that some of the girls had been forcibly sterilized, so that the plant wouldn’t have to worry about any pregnancies. Bathroom breaks were extremely limited in this place and there were all kinds of reports of kidney problems from these girls having to work in these hot conditions, drinking dirty water and then not being able to go to the bathroom. And the wages were very low in this particular plant and there were also reports of when the girls didn’t keep up the speed with their piece-rate, they were forced to stand out in the brutal Salvadorian sun, in a yard, where many of them fainted. And then, of course, after they used them up, between the ages of 13 and 25, at 25 you were kicked out the door of this place. But on balance, this place had some of the worst working conditions of any of the plants in the free zone.

Phillip Babich: The Free Zone is an area north of San Salvador designated for international trade. Tariffs and taxes are virtually nonexistent. So-called free market policies such as GATT and NAFTA have allowed foreign corporations unrestricted access to human labor and natural resources in many nations. Government officials in El Salvador and other Latin American countries have established special free trade zones where private companies can operate with little interference, sometimes with military support. Marina Rios, coordinator of the Women Garment Workers Organizing Project in El Salvador, says that these economic changes have restructured her society, leaving families dependent on sweatshop jobs.

Marina Rios: The economic model that has been in place in El Salvador -that has been imposed in El Salvador- for several years now, offers no other window of employment opportunities. Our borders are open for markets -for international markets- and for corporations to come without any state control, so there are no other employment opportunities.

Larry Weiss: On the one hand, if you kinda looked at it from a systemic point of view...

Phillip Babich: Larry Weiss is with the Resource Center of the Americas, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Larry Weiss: You find that there is this incredible symbiosis if you will between the policies of, for instance our own government and the international lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank etcetera. That are producing more and more people who are without work and willing to take work at any wage. In other words, people are being economically driven of the land. Small businesses are being shut down by credit restrictions etcetera. And so economies are being tailored by these international institutions to produce a lot of people who are desperate for work. So then the companies come in looking for people who are desperate for work. Many of these people were producing on the land and being relatively self-sufficient ten years ago, now they’re not.

Marina Rios: Our countries economy was always based on agricultural production. And since the ruling party has been in power, the Arena party, they have no interest in reviving the agricultural economy, in stimulating internal production. They are concentrated solely on finances and commerce. For example, you can find a lot of stuff on the streets, you can get items for peoples consumption but you can’t find any food, no vegetables. All these things are no longer grown in El Salvador, they are coming from somewhere else. And so while the people in power have no interest in stimulating agricultural production, they do have interest in stimulating free markets and opening borders and so on. This type of economy is based solely on the work of women. More than that, on the exploitation of women who offer a very cheap source of labor.

Phillip Babich: Rios adds that garment workers in El Salvador make -- at most -- $4 per day. That’s about one-sixth the amount of money a mother would need to support her household.

Marina Rios: Imagine just what they have to do, they have to complement this income with all kinds of other activities, such as prostitution and participation in informal markets. They go out and sell perfumes, clothes, medicines, but there’s a really high percentage of prostitution among the workers themselves that are working for these maquiladoras.

Phillip Babich: In the summer of 1998, students from 8 U.S. universities traveled in Central America to learn about garment factories there and speak with workers and labor organizers. Charles Kernaghan and the National Labor Committee sponsored the trip.

You may recall Kernaghan and his organization for bringing TV star Kathy Lee Gifford to tears after revealing that the celebrity’s Wal-Mart clothing line was sewn by young girls in abysmal labor conditions in Honduran sweatshops.

In the following excerpt from a speech he gave in October, Kernaghan begins by describing a meeting with Salvadoran workers who make clothes for the Liz Claiborne line.

Charles Kernaghan: It’s a Sunday night at 8 o’clock and a bunch of women come in, sit down, and they start telling us their stories. They tell us that they just got off of work, and that they work seven days a week. Three nights a week they work until 10:30 or 11:00 p.m., two nights a week they work until 8:00 o’clock, and on the weekends when they come in on Saturday, they work until 5:00 o’clock Saturday night, or they work the entire night, a 22 hour shift. If they don’t work the 22 hour shift, then they work until 4:00 o’clock on Sunday.

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And they’re telling us workers, new workers are tested for pregnancy. If they test positive they’re fired immediately. They’re telling us that everything is by a piece rate. There’s tremendous pressure to produce, and garments are thrown in their faces. Obviously they’re producing for a U.S. company. They tell us about 60 cent wages in El Salvador which meet about one-third of the cost of living, real starvation wages, no one can survive on it. They tell us that the week before we arrived eighteen workers were fired because they were protesting having to work on a national holiday, Patrons Saints Day in El Salvador, which was on August 6th. We have spoken to workers who had only three days off in a nine month period. And for daring to protest the forced overtime were fired. And when we asked them for what label they were producing they reached into their pocket and they took out Liz Claiborne. And they were making Liz Claiborne garments. Liz Claiborne has been dealing with that factory since 1992. It’s a Korean owned factory called Do-All. This isn’t like a fly-by-night case, this is a case that Liz Claiborne has had a consistent relationship with this company for the last 6 years. All of these factories -- ten foot high cinder block walls, topped with barbed wire and the metal gates that people have seen. And the young girls getting ready to go to work -- 16, 17 years of age. The workers get 60 cents an hour, a little less, $4.79 cents a day. It costs the workers 80 cents to go back and forth to work, so that’s 80 cents for the round trip bus. For breakfast it was 91 cents for a tiny breakfast, and lunch of a little chili and tortillas and some beans was a $1.37. So just surviving, going back and forth to work and eating is $3.08. You make $4.79, that leaves you with a $1.71, and how do you live, what do you do with your family on a $1.71. How do you go to the doctor, how do you eat, how do you pay rent, how do you pay health care, how do you pay child care, how do you buy new clothing. It turns out that the cheapest rent in this area, this is in San Salvador where the workers are living, was about $80.00 a month for really sub-standard living conditions, $2.63 a day. So obviously, if you go to work and you survive, and then you pay the rent, you have no money left over for food. In fact you have less than nothing because you have $1.71 left over and it is $2.63 for the rent.

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So the women sewing the Liz Claiborne jackets, told us that they frequently went to bed hungry, them and their families. And one thing that they tried to do was collect, if they could pull together like 28 cents they could have supper, of tortillas and eggs, so that would be their supper. They told us that they could, in their diet, they obviously couldn’t afford milk for their kids, they couldn’t afford vitamins, they tried to have relatives in the United States send vitamins. They couldn’t afford meat, they couldn’t afford fish, they couldn’t afford cereals, they couldn’t afford juices. Same situation you hear in the other countries as well. And they never could afford to buy a new piece of clothing. when we asked them could you buy new clothing, they laughed and said we couldn’t even buy a scrap of underwear, let alone new clothing. So they make $198.00 jackets but all the clothing they buy is used, second-hand clothing, sent in from the United States.

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Well, what would happen if Liz Claiborne paid a living wage in El Salvador. Not the wage to climb into some dignity and decency but the wage that the local groups said of about $1.18 an hour that would allow the workers to climb out of misery and into poverty. If Liz Claiborne was to pay the astounding wage of $1.18 an hour, the total labor cost to sew the garment would be $1.66. Which is still only 9/10 of one percent of the sales price of the garment, which would mean, Liz Claiborne and its contract to Do-All factory would still control 99.1 percent of the sales price of the garment. And it’s impossible to imagine that they can’t make their profit by holding on to 99.1 percent of the retail price of the garment.

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In the United States the average apparel wage is $8.42 an hour. In Mexico the wage is 54 to 50 cents, now it’s more like 50 cents because the peso keeps going down. And of course in the last 12 months in the United States we’ve lost another 68,000 apparel jobs. It was interesting, in August we lost a 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States, despite the fact they’re telling us the economy is booming.

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Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer in the world, the biggest retailer in the United States, the biggest retailer in Mexico and Canada. Wal-Mart in fact is the fourth largest company in the United States by sales and the eleventh largest in the world by sales. And Wal-Mart loves to wrap itself in the American flag, and it’s quite a trip to go into Wal-Mart. The first thing you see is a cardboard banner with stars and stripes and flags and everything, and then you’re going into the store a little bit more and there’s flags hanging everywhere. And then you start seeing signs saying made right here, bring it home to the USA, we support American manufacturers that support American jobs. It’s really, it’s really quite touching. So we figured this is interesting, Wal-Mart produces in the United States.

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So we called Wal-Mart to question them, to ask how much of their clothing is made in the United States and how much of the sneakers and the shoes and the handbags and all, and Wal-Mart said they didn’t know. Which of course is completely stupid. They are the ones who are putting the clothing and the sneakers in the store, of course they know how much is imported and how much is made in the United States. But they claimed ignorance, "Well, we have no idea".

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So we did something that was very risky for our sanity, we spent a hundred hours in Wal-Mart stores counting clothing. Wal-Mart is a funny place. We went to 12 different states and went into 14 different stores counting clothing, did it every Friday night, Saturday and Sunday until I was nearly completely insane. And you go into the stores and there are hidden cameras and all retailers and detectives obviously. And we found out that obviously, if you took out a notebook they pound on you immediately, if you take a camera out they jump on you. But we found out that you could do strange things at Wal-Mart and no-one really cared. So the way we did the survey was by using voice-activated tape-recorders we put in our pocket, and we just walked around the store talking to ourselves. And you could do a strange behavior like that and no-one said a single word.

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So we ended up counting a 105,000 items. Like I said, I was about a 100 hours in the store and then we had to transcribe the tapes, that took another 200 hours or more, very boring tapes. But, counted a 105,000 items, 86,500 pieces of clothing, and of the 86,500 pieces of clothing only 17 percent were made in the United States, 83 percent were made off-shore. We counted 16,245 pairs of shoes and only 16 were made in the United States. Not 16 percent, 16 pairs of shoes. All the rest of them were made in China an a very few from Mexico and Indonesia and Thailand. We counted 1,910 handbags and just stopped because every single one of them was made in China, there wasn’t a single one made in the United States.

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Wal-Mart’s sales over a $118 billion make Wal-Mart 203 times larger than the government of Nicaragua. And yet when Wal-Mart produces in Nicaragua they pay no taxes, not a cent. I mean, none of the companies do. They operate in free trade zones, and in those free trade zones they pay no corporate tax, they pay no income tax, they pay no sales tax, they pay absolutely nothing. And they pay no tariffs, on the way in or out, with the clothing. So what they leave behind in a place like Nicaragua fro example, is the 23 cent wages and the rent, that’s it. So they’ve got an interesting system set up for themselves.

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And then, you know, in Guatemala they were using child labor. Wal-Mart clothing was being made by thirteen year olds being paid 31 cents an hour, frequently forced to work seven days a week and also beaten if they made mistakes on the job. Wal-Mart is one of the really nasty, vicious companies.

Phillip Babich: Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee based in New York City.

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To expose labor rights violation tied to U.S.-based companies, the National Labor Committee has launched "The People’s Right to Know Campaign." Its goal is to force corporations to disclose how and where imported garments are made.

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Toward the end of the program we’ll be giving out a phone number in case you’d like to learn more about this campaign. So, you might want to grab something to write with.

You’re listening to Making contact, a production of the National Radio Project. This program can be heard across the North America, and in Haiti and South Africa. You can also hear us on the internet. To find out how, e-mail us at contact@igc.org.

Some companies have begun responding to pressure from human rights and labor groups. After intense lobbying, The Gap signed an agreement with the People of Faith Network and the National Labor committee, pledging to push for improved working conditions at Mandarin International, the notorious garment factory in El Salvador. In fact, The Gap, Eddie Bauer and other corporations temporarily suspended business with Mandarin until it made progress.

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Reverend David Dyson...

David Dyson: The most important thing we were able to work out with The Gap, was a provision that allowed for independent human rights monitoring of the plant. And we agreed on some people from down there, in the country, from the diocese of San Salvador and from the Catholic University, who would come over, once a week, announced at different times and tour the plant and check with the women who sew there. And also give the women an opportunity to meet with them off-site, so that they wouldn’t be fear retribution by the government. So that has been going on for a couple of years now and has really been a model for independent monitoring, which is really the only way to check on a plants compliance with any of its codes.

Larry Weiss: But they only produce in two countries in Central America, and they apparently have about 47 countries around the world where factories are approved for GAP production. And they may be sourcing from any one of those, up to all 47 of those, at any given time.

Phillip Babich: Larry Weiss of the Resource Center of The Americas..

Larry Weiss: And they weren’t willing to do anything about the issue of wages. They certainly have been considering it, they have been willing to talk about it subsequently, but they haven’t done anything yet in terms of dealing with the issue of wages. So from an activist point of view, we’re still in the process of building sufficient consumer pressure to try to reach higher goals than simply independent monitoring in a limited number of factories. And so what we say to consumers is, "If you want to have some effect on this, then you have to be to some extent an activist. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and organize committees and demonstrations, but you do have to be willing to write letters to companies, to talk to the managers of stores when you go in etcetera.

Phillip Babich: Marina Rios of the Women Garment Workers Organizing Project in El Salvador says that an international movement needs to grow so that information about corporations and organizing strategies can be shared among grassroots activists.

Marina Rios: This problem, the problem of corporations throughout the world getting away with all these things has to be fought from many forums. I don’t believe that this is just a problem for labor unions to address. The example of the women workers should be heeded by all parts of society, especially, for example, women’s movements. This type of issue calls for a world wide social movement. We should all get together and fight for regional and global regulations of corporations so that they answer everywhere that they go, not just in their countries of origin. We must learn about the corporations, so that if I’m in El Salvador, I want to tell my friends or my colleagues that are fighting against all this stuff in Indonesia, what corporations are doing here, which corporations they are. And we have to disseminate this information, make it really public so that it is well-known throughout the world, and so that we can all take action.

Phillip Babich: But, so far corporations have not been forced to disclose this information. And, the Clinton administration’s task force on Sweatshop Labor has not acted to change reporting requirements, says Reverend Dyson.

Reverend Dyson: Well, I think it has been a complete and total bust, because the companies have not wanted to disclose where any of these factories are. We are in a big fight with Wal-Mart right now who has hundreds of factories in Southern China and will not disclose to anyone where they are. They say it’s a trade secret, which is really not true because a lot of those factories do multiple work. They’ll be doing work for Wal-Mart on one table and for K-Mart on the other table. So it’s not a big secret inside the industry. They don’t want you to know where those factories are so that people can’t go and check on them. So one of the failures of the White House Task Force was that the companies have no requirement to reveal actually where they’re doing the work. And then the companies wanted their own auditing firms, like Pete Marwick, and you know, professional groups like that to be the monitors. Well, what kind of independent monitors are paid by the companies, that to us is a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop?

Philip Babich: To learn how organizations are putting pressure on companies to reveal how and where their product made, call the National Labor Committee and ask about "The People’s Right to Know Campaign." The phone number is (212) 242-3002.

Phillip Babich: Young people across the United States are organizing against child and sweatshop labor. Guin Ellsworth is in her third year at St. Paul Central High School in Minnesota, Minneapolis. She has organized junior high and high school students in her area and is making connections with youth organizers in other states to raise awareness about the garment industry.

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Guin spoke with Making contact’s Peggy Law about youth activism and its impact on corporations.

Guin Ellsworth: The main thing with child labor, and with sweatshops with teenagers and with sweatshops who aren’t technically children, but it’s still a form of young people going to work, is that they’re missing work. And that’s something that’s so vital for young people, to go to school and to get an education so that they can maybe try to get out of whatever kind of situation they are born into. Otherwise if they end up with no education and no way to advance in life, or in a job they won’t ever be able to get out of this situation. Also, some of the condition that kids are forced to work under are awful, like children carrying bricks that are way too heavy for them, or in the carpet weaving industry.

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You know there’s kind of bonded slavery where children have to live in the carpet factories and they work there. They’re working for about twelve hours a day. Their hands get worn from having to thread the yarn. People like children to work for them because they’re less likely to organize because they don’t know their rights and they are easier to boss around and to intimidate. It’s less likely that they are going to strike back for giving them such bad conditions and work to get better ones.

Peggy Law: Do you think that these big companies who are making a lot of money by employing child labor and having sweatshops. Why do you think that they are going to listen to young people.

Guin Ellsworth: These big companies are usually concerned about public relations and stuff like that. There’s trends where you’ll hear that a company is better then others and so you’ll go out and buy their stuff. If there’s a trend that Nike is really bad and that their conditions are really bad, they get really uptight with their public relations and they are nervous. And they’ll do stuff like when Philip Knight said that he was going to change the minimum age, even though the real problem with Nike is their minimum wage which he didn’t talk at all about. Raising wages and that’s one of the biggest things with Nike. So he’s kind of avoiding the problem but he still got nervous by all the associations Nike had with child labor. He still came forward, trying to make these changes and make his public relations a little bit better. For every letter that someone writes it’s equal to the voices of a hundred people. It’s important, we tell people that when we ask them to write letters to big corporations or something. Because it shows you how much these big companies are concerned about their public relations, and since teenagers are such a big market for a lot of companies, it does make a difference.

Phillip Babich: Youth organizer Guin Ellsworth speaking with Peggy Law.

That’s it for this edition of Making Contact...a look at labor conditions and the garment industry. Thanks for listening. And special thanks this week to Selene Jaramillo for translations and voice-over assistance. We had production help from Susan Celli and Shereen Meraji. I’m Phillip Babich.

If you want more information about the subject of this week’s program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts or if you’d like to make a comment or suggestion for future programs. That’s 800-529-5736.

Making Contact is an independent production funded by individual contributors. We’re committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. Our National producer is David Barsamian, Phillip Babich is managing producer, Norman Solomon is our Senior Advisor, Shereen Meraji is the Production Assistant, Peggy Law is Executive Director. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. For everyone at Making Contact, thanks for listening!