Must Globalization Mean Sweatshop Labor?

Must Globalization Mean Sweatshop Labor?

Americans know that many of the products they buy every day come from other countries. The chart below shows the share of goods sold in the U.S., by industry, that have imported material:

• Shoes and leather products: 66%

• Clothing: 45%

• Computers and office equipment: 42%

• Miscellaneous manufactured items: 40%

• Petroleum and natural gas: 36%

• Wood and fish products: 36%

• Ophthalmic and photographic equipment: 33.5%

• Electrical machinery and supplies: 30%

• Motor vehicles: 29%

• Audio, video and communications equipment: 28.5%

(Source: The Conference Board, New York Times, 3/20/03)

Many Westerners do not know about the conditions under which the products they buy are produced:

·  Teenage women in China make toys for Mattel. They work as much as 18 hours a day, seven days a week in 104-degree temperatures. They handle toxic chemicals with their bare hands and make as little as 13 cents an hour. (National Labor Committee)

·  One-quarter of the bananas sold in the U.S. come from Ecuador. In 1999 the International Labor Organization estimated that 69,000 children, ages 10-14, were working in Ecuadoran fields. One of them, working for nothing on a 3,000-acre hacienda, is Esteban Menendez, who says, "I come here after school and I work here all day. I have to work to help my father, to help him make money." Esteban climbs "15-foot banana plants, tying insecticide-laced cords between them to stabilize trunks that might otherwise collapse...."

·  Families live in cinder-block houses with tin roofs, most of them without indoor bathrooms. Most workers earn so little that they must decide which of their children to send to school and which to the fields or factories. The result is that 55% of Ecuadoran children do not go to school, according to the World Bank. "The existence of child labor on plantations is a product of simple arithmetic. Workers receive so little in part because the wholesalers and retailers abroad reap most of the profits, particularly with the recent consolidation of huge retail outlets like Wal-Mart, Costco and Carrefour." (New York Times, 7/13/02)

·  Shirts for hip-hop artist Sean Combs' Sean John fashion company are made in Honduras. One of the workers, Lydda Eli Gonzalez, said factory managers forced them to work unpaid overtime, forbade talking during work hours, and fired pregnant workers. Fourteen workers were suddenly fired after they tried to unionize. The factory owner denied these charges and said, "I never mistreated anybody. I treat employees just like I'd like to be treated myself."

·  Charles Kernaghan, executive director of the National Labor Committee, said he and other committee officials had interviewed some 20 workers. "It's a factory where the workers have zero rights." He said the workers receive 15 cents in wages for each Sean Jean shirt that sells for $40. (New York Times, 10/28/03)

The Gap

The Gap clothing company, which also owns Old Navy and Banana Republic, is one of the most profitable clothing retailers in the world. By the end of 2003, Gap Inc. was worth over $28 billion and CEO Millard Drexler made more than $39 million. And yet, The Gap has been accused of exploiting its workers all around the globe. Gap Chairman Donald Fisher denies that any abuses of its workers occur.

·  Gap workers from China, Thailand, Bangladesh and the Philippines must sign contracts before they are employed, giving up such human rights as the freedom to join unions, attend religious services, quit or marry. They work 12-16 hour days and are not paid for overtime.

·  Gap produces clothes in Saipan in the Northern Marianas Islands, which is a U.S. territory. Gap labels these clothes "Made in the U.S.A.," but they do not obey U.S. labor laws in their Saipan facilities. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has cited over 1000 violations, including insufficient clean drinking water, blocked exits and other fire hazards, unsanitary bathrooms and crowded, very hot working conditions.

·  In Russia, workers earn 11 cents an hour.

·  In Macao workers complain that they are forced to work extra hours, subjected to forced pregnancy tests, earn $4 a day and are fired if they try to form a union.

"Gap claims to be a 'No Sweat' trendsetter by 'eradicating sweatshops in America' and its code of conduct is supposed to guarantee workers a safe and dignified work environment. Yet as the working conditions in Honduras, Russia, Saipan...and elsewhere demonstrate, Gap's good behavior claims are blatantly false," charges the organization Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org).

Some argue that even if they suffer in sweatshop conditions, many of these workers are better off than they would be if they didn't have access to such jobs. Others argue that no human beings should have to work under such conditions.

Unions in wealthier countries maintain that allowing corporations to mistreat workers in poor countries this way makes things worse for workers everywhere. Many workers in the U.S. and other higher-wage countries are now afraid to demand wage increases, better benefits or a union because they know that employers can always find low-paid, unorganized workers somewhere else on the globe. Partly for this reason, U.S. unions support workers in poorer countries who are trying to organize.

A Chicken Processor in Chile

A taxi driver in Chile quit because he couldn't make enough money. He got a job at a chicken-processing plant in a small town owned by Chileans. The plant processes chickens for sale in Chile and for export to other Latin American countries as well as to Europe and Asia.

"His job is to stand in a freezing room and crack open chickens as they come down an assembly line at the rate of 41 chickens per minute," writes Tina Rosenberg in New York Times Magazine, 8/18/02. "His work uniform does not protect him from the cold, the man said, and after a few minutes of work he loses feeling in his hands. Some of his colleagues, he said, are no longer able to raise their arms. If he misses a day he is docked $30. He earns less than $200 a month. Globalization has offered this man a hellish job, but it is a choice he did not have before, and he took it. I don't name him because he is afraid of being fired. When the chicken company is hiring, the lines go around the block."

A Dump Collector in Cambodia

Nhep Chanda, a 17-year-old girl, is one of many Cambodians who have no choice but to spend their days combing through a dump for plastic bags and metal cans to sell. Smoke and insects plague the scavengers. Their feet get cut and their hands get caked with filth. Nhep Chanda averages 75 cents a day. "I'd like to work in a factory," she said," but I don't have any ID card, and you need one to show that you're old enough."

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote of Chanda and others like her: "All the complaints about third world sweatshops are true and then some....But they have raised the standard of living in Singapore, South Korea and southern China, and they offer a leg up for people in countries like Cambodia...Here in Cambodia jobs are in such demand that workers usually have to bribe a factory insider with a month's salary just to get hired....In Asia, moreover, the factories tend to hire mostly girls and young women with few other job opportunities. The result has been to begin to give girls and women some status and power, some hint of social equality, some alternative to the sex industry....if the U.S. tries to ban products from countries that don't meet international standards, jobs will be shifted from the most wretched areas to better-off nations like Malaysia or Mexico. Already there are very few factories in Africa or the poor countries of Asia, and if we raise the bar higher, there will be even fewer." (New York Times, 1/14/04)

Disney and Wal-Mart workers in Bangladesh

In Daka, Bangladesh, workers make shirts for Disney and Wal-Mart. Most are women who regularly work 14-hour days and sometimes even longer. Most make 11 cents to 17 cents an hour, hardly enough to support themselves, much less a family. They must meet daily production quotas—for example, to sew a button on a shirt in 8 seconds. If they are told to work overtime, they must comply, even though they may not be paid for it. If they complain, they are likely to be beaten or fired.

These working women have no rights, no days off, no parental leave, no sick pay, no pensions, no time for private lives. What they do have are filthy drinking water, filthy bathrooms and monotonous, almost endless labor. If they try to organize a union to win some rights, they will almost certainly be fired and probably beaten as well. They live in one-room shanties with leaking roofs and dirt floors. By the time they are 35 or so, they are worn out, unable to meet production quotas and are fired.

Every day Americans wear shirts and pants produced by 1.8 million garment workers in Bangladesh.

(Information from "The Hidden Face of Globalization," a Crowing Rooster Arts film production distributed by the National Labor Committee, www.nlcnet.org.)

Questions for Discussion

1.  What imports can you find in the room around you (from the clothing you are wearing to objects in the classroom)? What do you know about conditions for workers in the countries where these items were made? How could you find out?

2.  Millions of workers around the world labor under terrible conditions. Why are they so terrible?

3.  Do you agree with Rosenberg that the Chilean taxi driver is better off working in a chicken-processing plant? with Kristof that the young Cambodian woman would be better off working in a sweatshop? Why or why not?

4.  Why don't the women working under miserable conditions in apparel factories in Bangladesh simply quit?