TO END SWEET SHOPS In response to new consumer awareness, heightened by globalization, big-name companies with labor contractors abroad have begun to institute labor codes
Senser, Robert A
TO END SWEATSHOPS Workers' rights in a global economy Robert A. Senser On its 1997 world survey, Human Rights Watch indicts Western democracies for abandoning their human-rights commitments in...
...The global dimension of this problem makes it very easy to shrug off personal responsibility...
...Although the Partnership Agreement may produce some early im-provements here and there, it is limited to one industry head-quartered in one country, and even within that industry some big players have yet to join...
...Even some name-brand companies with codes of conduct found themselves the subject of labor horror stories on na-tional TV...
...I can't figure it out," a re-porter in Hong Kong was told by a Nike executive wondering why Levi Strauss would abandon such a large market...
...Another is the freedom to impose long working hours...
...Its flakiness was beyond question in the mind of David L. Lindauer, professor of economics at Wellesley College and a World Bank consultant...
...But the attraction is not limited to low wages...
...Others who are just as concerned about the problem called it a his-toric "breakthrough...
...It must at the same time actively encourage similar partnerships in kindred industries in Canada, Europe, and Japan...
...That in no way diminishes the need for consumers and worker-rights ad-vocates to maintain pressure on all who share complicity in repression...
...Couldn't they also work together to as-sure the quality of life of shoe workers...
...Physical and psychological violence, and the threat of such violence, require priority attention, not just because of the wrongs done to individuals (though that is reason enough for action) but because of their use as management tools to instill fear into the whole work force and thus keep it in tight control...
...The next several months are crucial...
...To avoid that personal com-plicity, many consumers "are insisting on guarantees that they are not buying the products of abusive labor conditions...
...The new code's call for a "safe and healthy working environment" could help some of China's shoe workers, who include 230,000 women in Fujian alone...
...In an incident on March 14 in Vietnam, for example, fifty-six women who had not worn the proper shoes to work were forced to run around their Nike factory again and again until twelve of them collapsed under a hot sun and were taken to a hospi-tal emergency room...
...Lambs led to slaughter," a woman's magazine in Beijing reported in its expose...
...He found that at a Nike plant in rural Indonesia, supervisors get special instruction in how to discipline women workers...
...Even using the term "collective bargaining" can bring harsh reprisals in China...
...To these female workers, this code provision is especially meaningful: "No employee shall be subject to any physical, sexual, psychological, or verbal harassment or abuse...
...Both the positive and the negative as-sessments are correct...
...and accept responsibility for a new approach to assuring "humane and decent working conditions" in the factories of their countless contractors and subcontractors throughout the world...
...His successor, Alexis M. Herman, has made a public commit-ment to do so...
...government has an indispensable role-giving the partnership the same imaginative support provided last year under the leadership of then Secretary of Labor Reich...
...Pressures mounted to such a point in 1996 that then Secretary of Labor Robert Reich persuaded President Bill Clinton to appoint a task force-formally called a "Part-nership"-of leaders from business, labor, human-rights, re-ligious, and consumer organizations to look at sweatshop problems that centered on the apparel industry...
...Such abuse by supervisors and managers is shock-ingly widespread and takes many forms...
...In the opinion of some who know the historic habits of this industry first-hand, codes of conduct are often just a fig leaf for doing business as usual...
...A new study by Peter Hancock, a researcher at the Center for Development Studies at Edith Cowan University in Australia, also illustrates that need...
...The centerpiece is a code of conduct designed to eradicate sweatshop conditions in apparel workplaces pro-ducing for the U.S...
...It's far from easy...
...Thus, the decision announced at the White House on April 14 is indeed historic...
...But the media intervened in its own way, peeking into distant factories and bringing shock-ing scenes of human exploitation into Western living rooms...
...Even with the best of in-tentions and diligence, reform of sweatshops will be piece-meal if industries in other countries fail to get religion...
...As sovereigns, governments like China's should, of course, be responsible for enforcing their own laws, but when they show signs of doing so they hear business threats to move elsewhere...
...In an article on the Levi Strauss code, which was the most thorough at the time, a Business Week headline (August 1, 1994) asked: "Is Levi Strauss's approach visionary-or flaky...
...In one disaster publicized within China in early 1996, at least two women workers died, and more than thir-ty were stricken with leukemia and anemia, by inhaling toxic fumes from benzene and other chemicals in poorly venti-lated foreign-owned shoe factories in the coastal province of Fujian...
...otherwise its work will not be sustainable over the long run...
...The wide range of such human-rights violations in China led to Levi Strauss's 1993 decision to phase out its opera-tions in the People's Republic...
...By firing or otherwise punishing union members, a management on its own can ordinarily crush any employee initiative to unionize...
...In its language about unions, the industry agreement is more specific than are most of the already existing individ-ual codes...
...It must decide exactly how to label products made in compliance with the new code...
...The skills include use of abusive language such as, "Move, you stupid bitch," and, "Fuck you...
...Further, it urges companies to "con-sult periodically with legally constituted unions representing employees at the work site regarding the monitoring pro-cess...
...But there is far less here than the wording suggests...
...Employers shall recognize and respect the right of employees to freedom of association and collective bar-gaining," it declares...
...Unfortunately, the White House agreement re-quires training on the code's standards only for code mon-itors, who will necessarily be few in number, not for managers and supervisors, the individuals most directly responsible for implementing the code...
...Bean, Patagonia, Nicole Miller, and other leaders of the in-dustry (really a group of overlapping industries) have pub-licly signed on to a document in which they: recognize the human problems that afflict large parts of their industry...
...How to provide reliable guides against such complicity...
...they issued a joint press release denouncing the agreement as flawed...
...The new code does not diminish that attraction, since, instead of calling for a living wage, it settles for respecting the "minimum wage re-quired by local law," which is uniformly low and, even then, often unenforced in China and elsewhere...
...The code sets a sixty-hour week maximum but adds an escape clause: per-mission for still longer hours "in extraordinary business circumstances...
...What will they do...
...Across these two points stretches a complex series of relationships-among contractors, subcontractors, local governments, Asian conglomerates, U.S...
...The brutal truth is that change will not come quickly...
...During that time the partnership is to set up a permanent association to carry out its work...
...For that it deserves encouragement from all sides...
...Most of the industry's production is concentrated in China, Viet-nam, Indonesia, and other countries in which the govern-ment systematically represses the twin right to organize and to bargain...
...The Partnership Agreement, Clinton said, "will significantly reduce the use of sweatshop labor over the long run...
...TO END SWEATSHOPS Workers' rights in a global economy Robert A. Senser On its 1997 world survey, Human Rights Watch indicts Western democracies for abandoning their human-rights commitments in favor of trade and investment opportunities in countries like China, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia...
...it is protected by the self-interest of elites accruing incredible economic and political benefits from it, and bolstered by rationalizations often similar to those that perpetuated slavery and racial segregation...
...In a May 30 address at a Marymount Univer-sity conference on sweatshop solutions, she said: "We must relegate sweatshops to the history books...
...Also, "extraordinary business circum-stances" occur often enough to justify extraordinarily long working hours, sometimes twenty-four hours or more straight through...
...In the early 1990s Levi Strauss, Reebok, and a few large importers of garments and other goods de-veloped codes of labor practices for their contractor firms, almost all located overseas...
...He called sweatshop conditions such as child labor normal in early stages of economic de-velopment, and advised against any kind of intervention, even by voluntary codes of conduct {Harvard Business Review, January-February 1993...
...But the code has no implementation deadlines, and so Gerard Greenfield of the Asian Monitor Resource Center, a fact-finding nongovernmental group in Hong Kong, asks: "How long will it take to stop benzene poi-soning...
...The present system of exploiting the most vulnerable workers is widely dispersed and deep rooted...
...On the positive side: Nike, Reebok, Liz Claiborne, L.L...
...As one participant, union leader Jay Mazur, pointed out, it is a "first step," one as advanced as possible at the present time...
...It will give American consumers greater confidence in what they buy...
...It won editorial praise from both the New York Times and the Washington Post...
...Though Nike claims that such episodes are isolated, they at the very least indicate a need for prop-er training...
...It is a basic weapon to inhibit worker demands for the "decent and humane working conditions" laid down in the new code...
...The report pinpoints the motives behind this growing pop-ular support: "Because the goods purchased in one country may be produced by victims of repression in another, the very act of consumption can be seen as complicity in that re-pression-unless steps are taken to ensure that manufacturing is free of labor-rights abuse...
...but if the "troublemakers" become too numerous, the government can usually be counted on to apply force from the police and even the military...
...The Wall Street Journal article (May 5,1993) that reported the de-cision and industry reactions was headlined: "Levi Strauss, Leaving China, Passes Crowd of Firms Going the Other Way...
...Seven U.S...
...Yet what good will the agreement do where it counts: in the lives of the millions of women, children, and men who make the shirts, dresses, pajamas, shoes, and other things we wear...
...The attraction behind this mass movement, which has ac-celerated since 1993, is multifaceted...
...corporate headquarters, bankers, boards of directors, stockholders, buy-ers for retail stores, and many other intermediaries-each with priorities that crowd out concern for those making the shoes...
...market...
...It is a long way between the foreign workplaces making, say, sport shoes and the stores selling them...
...By that time there will be permanent dam-age to the women who work with it at least sixty hours a week...
...A fact of life not mentioned in the agreement is that most of the workers in export-oriented factories in Asia and Latin America are young women...
...No other significant group of leaders of a global industry has made such a commitment...
...In such coun-tries, the advice about consulting "legally constituted unions" is empty, since such organizations are controlled either by the government or management, or both...
...firms still on the outside...
...It must bring into its ranks the many U.S...
...As the organization's 1997 report puts it, the glob-al economy is creating "new and immediate connections among distant people," and is thereby spawning "a sur-prising new source of support for the human-rights cause" among ordinary citizens in the United States, Canada, and Europe...
...activists with first-hand knowledge of sweat-shop labor overseas reacted negatively...
...In other words, they don't want to be a party to subsidizing sweatshops...
...Another attraction is that factory health and safety reg-ulations are weak and almost never enforced, despite sky-high death and injury rates in China and other "miracle" economies...
...Some other multinationals fol-lowed, each with its own emphasis in listing abusive prac-tices that it would not tolerate...
...But the report sees a bright spot, an emerging countervail-ing trend...
...Low wages form one of China's attractions, as in other countries where the ap-parel industry farms out its production...
...A year...
...Indeed-let's be realis-tic- the Partnership Agreement could turn out as nothing more than a PR shot in the arm for the various brand names represented at the April 14 ceremony...
...Ironically, sixty hours is higher than the legal maximums set in China and in some other countries, but no matter: The countries' statutory requirements are seldom enforced...
...A strong "yes" assumption underpins the work, present and future, of the Apparel Industry Partnership...
...At a White House ceremony last April 14, Clinton gave his quasi-official seal of approval to the partnership's seven-page action report, the result of seven months of negotia-tions...
...Despite a long chain of relation-ships, traversing many borders and vast seas, people in the industry do somehow manage to work together to assure the quality of shoes...
...The U.S...
...Still, it need not be so...
...A Beijing factory worker named Zhou Guoqiang prepared a T-shirt with the Chinese lettering for collective bargaining and was secretly sentenced to three years in a labor camp on a charge of printing T-shirts with "slogans calculated to incite...
...The hold-outs will ponder ques-tions such as: "What about Canadian, European, and Japanese companies...
...The code blends elements of ex-isting individual codes-no employment of children under fourteen, a maximum workweek of sixty hours, a ban on harassment and abuse, no forced labor, and so on-and out-lines a voluntary, two-tiered monitoring system, one per-formed by companies, the other by independent external monitors...
Vol. 124 • July 1997 • No. 13
