Sweating It Out

In the typical Latin American free-trade zone, or maquiladora, a clump of factories ringed by a tall fence produce cut-rate apparel for American companies. In some Honduran maquiladoras, armed guards patrol the borders. The average age of the Honduran sweatshop laborer is about 15, though some are as young as 10. Workdays may stretch to 14 hours, six days a week, in oppressive heat, with only two tightly monitored breaks -- if at all -- for water and bathroom use.

"It's hard and painful work," says Wendy Diaz, a 16-year-old Honduran girl who worked at the Global Fashions factory, making pants for sale at Wal-Mart under the "Kathie Lee Gifford" line. "I started work there at 13. The managers were cruel. They would yell at us all the time. They would lock the bathrooms all day long. When we got tired or talked to each other, they would beat us to keep us on schedule." Diaz's family couldn't afford to let her stay in school past the fifth grade. At Global Fashions she worked 65 hours a week, every week of the year.

This dire situation is hardly confined to Latin American countries or the garment industry. "Sweatshops are absolutely not limited to apparel," says Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the National Labor Committee in New York City. "Sporting goods, electronics, shoes, sneakers, agricultural products, coffee, bananas -- you name it -- it's made under some pretty rough conditions -- in factories in Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia."

While these factories offer hope and jobs to the impoverished, the reality is that laborers work, without the most basic protections, for wages that fall short of what is required to survive. In Pakistan, children are often sold into servitude to owners of factories, where they are chained to looms for 15-hour days making rugs and carpets for export to the United States; in Africa and Indonesia, boys, some only 12 years old, are sent into hazardous mines owned by American and Canadian firms to extract gold and silver that will be forged into rings and trinkets; in Colombia, children are out in the coffee fields picking beans. In June of last year, the Associated Press reported that there may be more than 200 million children working in overseas sweatshops producing goods for American consumers.

The consequences of the new global trade spread beyond the wretched conditions inside the factories themselves, causing environmental degradation. New plants consume enormous amounts of energy in hitherto undeveloped areas. To meet the increased demand, Indonesia has begun constructing huge, coal-fired power plants, posing a grave threat to air quality. Similarly, China, the world's second-largest emitter of CO2, is building dozens of new coal-fired plants that will emit thousands more tons of greenhouse gasses each year. China's monumental ambitions include the 575-foot-tall, mile-long Three Gorges hydroelectric dam. It will turn nearly 350 miles of the Yangtze River into a reservoir, destroy wildlife habitat, and displace nearly one million people -- all in order to power 2,500 new factories, according to Owen Lammers of the International Rivers Network in Berkeley, California.

The attraction of developing countries for U.S. companies is easy to understand: no pesky environmental standards to put up with, no worker safety codes; minuscule corporate taxes and astoundingly cheap labor costs. In Haiti, for example, workers making the lucrative, movie-related clothing lines for Disney make no more than 30 cents an hour, or around $40 per month. Even in this impoverished country, that's not enough to live on without making sacrifices. Some costs, such as rent (which can consume half of the monthly pay), cannot be reduced. So usually it comes down to eating less, says Kernaghan. As Bob Herbert, a columnist with the New York Times, observes, these companies "thrive on the empty stomachs and other hardships of young women overseas."

The U.S. Commerce Department reports that nearly 50 percent of the apparel sold in the United States in 1995 was imported, up from 30 percent in 1980. Most of these garments are made in sweatshops throughout the developing world. In 1996, public concerns about overseas sweatshops prompted congressional hearings at which Wendy Diaz and other workers testified, followed by lofty promises by apparel companies to more closely monitor their contractors, and the formation of a presidential task force on the issue. But so far there's been no sign of a widespread shift toward restraints on child labor, better pay, environmental protection or safer working conditions. Part of the fault lies with the 1990s international trade pacts.

NAFTA and GATT have merely exacerbated labor and environmental problems, according to Sarah Anderson, a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. Companies such as General Electric (GE) and Alcoa have flocked to Mexico to take advantage of the country's meager environmental protections. Alcoa, which has been hit with some of the largest criminal fines for hazardous waste violations in U.S. history, opened a plant in Ciudad Acuña in 1993. Within a year, a series of poisonous gas leaks sent 226 workers to the hospital. When GE workers at its Ciudad Juarez plant talked to reporters about the deadly chemicals used at the factory, they were fired.

The figures on jobs lost in the U.S. are also sobering. Anderson points to a study from the University of Maryland which estimates that in 1994 alone more than 150,000 U.S. jobs were lost as a result of Mexican imports. In November 1995, Bureau of Labor statistics estimated that America may lose another 1.3 million manufacturing jobs by the year 2005.

"We find ourselves in a wage race with the rest of the world," says Charles Kernaghan. "It's a race to the bottom of the pay scale." The real wages of American workers have declined about 8 percent since 1989. Forced to compete with overseas sweatshops, American garment workers have watched their pay decline by more than 12 percent. And the pay of American farmworkers has fallen by more than 20 percent in the last two decades. Meanwhile, truckloads of low-cost (and pesticide-laden) Mexican fruits and vegetables stream across the border every day.

This disaster for workers and the environment has meant a bonanza for hundreds of multinational corporations. Take Nike, ostensibly an Oregon-based company that sold $5.6 billion in footwear alone last year. Nike began making shoes in 1967 in Japan. Rising labor costs prompted a move of its factories to South Korea in 1972. Donald Katz writes, in Just Do It, that the shoe plants were run by a combination "of terror and browbeating." After Korean workers won labor rights in the mid-1980s, Nike moved to Indonesia and China, and now has begun to shift operations to an even more pliant labor market: Vietnam.

In Vietnam, about 40,000 Nike workers produce nearly a million pairs of shoes each month. Thuyen Nguyen, of New York-based Vietnam Labor/Watch, says that Nike workers are subjected to intense verbal, physical and sexual abuse. In one factory outside Ho Chi Minh City, nearly 60 female workers were forced to run laps around the factory as punishment for not wearing the proper shoes. In another instance, 12 workers were viciously beaten on the head with a shoe by a plant supervisor. As discipline for talking on the factory floor, workers have had their mouths sealed with duct tape. "Nike is clearly not controlling its contractors," Thuyen says. "And the company has known that for a long time."

It costs Nike only $1.50 in Vietnam to manufacture a pair of basketball shoes that can be sold for $150 in the U.S. The production costs are low largely because the average pay of a Nike worker in Vietnam is only $42 a month, or about $500 a year. Compare this paltry sum to the $20 million a year Nike lavishes on Michael Jordon to hawk its basketball shoes, shorts and hats.

Things came to a head last year, when the National Labor Committee reported that talk-show hostess Kathie Lee Gifford's Wal-Mart clothing line was manufactured by child laborers in Honduran work camps. Confronted with incontrovertible evidence, Gifford disclaimed any knowledge of the situation. When it was later discovered that some of her blouses had been assembled under sweatshop conditions at the Seo Fashions factory in New York City, Kathie Lee sent her husband to hand out envelopes stuffed with $300 to underpaid laborers.

With the attention of the press and the public finally aroused, President Clinton convened a special task force to develop global labor standards for the apparel industry. The presidential panel includes companies such as Nike, Reebok, Patagonia and Liz Claiborne; two labor unions (Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees -- UNITE -- and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union); and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights.

The presidential panel agreed to establish a voluntary code of conduct, to be finalized this November, for overseas apparel factories under contract to American companies.

First, companies agreed to established a maximum 60-hour work week -- unless employees volunteer for more. The problem: Many workers, who aren't making even subsistence wages, feel compelled to work as much time as they can physically endure.

The panel rejected calls from human rights groups to adopt a "living wage policy" which would require contractors to pay at least subsistence wages. Instead, the agreement calls for companies to voluntarily pay their workers the prevailing minimum wage. In many Asian countries that means as little as 20 cents per hour, which does not come close to subsistence levels. In Indonesia, for example, the minimum wage is $2.36 a day, while it takes $4 a day just to meet basic needs. Some shoe companies, such as Reebok, reportedly have already voluntarily raised wages in Vietnam; what's needed are truly enforceable standards that won't perpetuate this circle of misery under another name.

Labor organizations lobbied hard for independent monitoring of factories by church and human rights groups, but business furiously fought off that proposal. As it stands, the crucial task of monitoring will be left to U.S. accounting firms, such as Peat Marwick and Coopers & Lybrand, paid by the apparel makers. Unless the proposal is toughened up before it goes into effect later this year, American companies will be able to get away with image enhancement on the cheap. "The problem is that the labor and human rights groups ended up making most of the sacrifices," says Ellen Braune of the National Labor Committee. "But these are only proposed rules. There's still a chance to improve them with enough public pressure."

That's where American consumers come in. The reason companies like Nike pay Michael Jordan $20 million is that their profits depend more on the image of the company than the quality of their products. That's why direct pressure on corporations may be the most effective consumer strategy of all. In April 1997, following publicity and leafletting by the U.S./Guatemala Labor Education Campaign, Starbucks Coffee has finally taken action towards a pilot project that will implement a more humane code of conduct by coffee growers toward workers in Guatemala. Disney could not long withstand a campaign that tells people that Mickey Mouse t-shirts are made by Haitian kids in oppressive sweatshops where they aren't paid enough to eat. "If Americans knew what was going on down here, the yelling, the hitting, the abuse," says Wendy Diaz, "I'm sure that they would help stop the maltreatment." Ellen Braune at the National Labor Committee says that individual letter-writing to companies such as Disney makes a big difference. It's time to let these companies know we won't buy the products of pain.

- Jeffrey St. Clair is the environmental editor of Counterpunch and co-author of Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (Verso, 1997).

Image courtesy of Dana O'Rourke.