Finding an anti-sweatshop strategy that works
Ballinger, Jeff
COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Finding an anti-sweatshop strategy that works JEFF BALLINGER That nearly twenty years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught is suggested by the cost...
...All the inspection/enforcement statistics should be folded into a matrix maintained by a nongovernmental organization working under a several-year grant from the State Department's Bureau of Human Rights, Democracy, and Labor...
...By the Indonesian government's admission, this provided only 68 percent of the "minimum physical needs" for a single adult...
...A decade ago, while a member of Nike's board of directors, Nobel laureate Spence told a group of business school students in Singapore that global firms "make nothing" and that corporations must be "ruthless and not tell people you can do it in-house when out-sourcing would do a better job...
...The report includes a discussion about how governments need to "mollify the influential minority of workers" in the formal, wage-paying sector...
...Activists across the globe would be thrilled to hear an American president calling into question such neoliberal tenets as the "flexible" workforce and the necessary "reform" of national labor codes-these two together have opened the door to a noxious insecurity of employment...
...Twenty years ago, I worked in the small Jakarta office of the Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AFL-CIO...
...It was an assessment of union rights in a factory producing for Reebok where-with much fanfare in 2002-Reebok had persuaded a contractor (the Shun Da Sporting Good Corporation in Fuzhou) to allow a secretballot election for union representatives: "The results of the [2007] investigation were extremely disappointing...
...Forced prostitution is the most wellknown form of human trafficking, but factory workers are also trafficked-and then sweated in legal or illegal shops...
...But first we need to collect information on sweatshop practices abroad and make it available to activists, who often can't collect it themselves...
...The "action" up to now consisted mainly of getting legislatures around the world to pass laws on human trafficking...
...Given the worldwide financial crisis, it is a safe bet that fighting sweatshop abuses here and abroad will not be a key policy undertaking for Barack Obama and his team...
...Did the local AID Mission pull back...
...And our attach‚s should also map out the bureaucratic chain of command, with names of responsible local officials and an account of who reports to whom...
...These are the policies that produce a worker's 18-cent share of a $37.99 hoodie...
...USAID (United States Agency for International Development) had recently made available funds for human rights grants...
...Similarly, when a story about Asian workers being mistreated in Jordanian apparel shops appeared in 2006, the Times's report quoted Yanal Beasha, Jordan's trade representative in Washington, as saying that Jordanian inspectors monitor working conditions in factories and that the government enforces overtime laws and recently increased the minimum wage for citizens and guest workers...
...And they are especially important as an antidote to the solipsism of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), wherein corporate "self-regulation" teams are rebranded as "activists" by lazy and compliant media...
...we applied and received something on the order of $20,000...
...Specifically, he could cite the World Bank's "competitive index," which ranks countries higher for ease of hiring and firing, reduced severance benefits, and other employer-friendly policies...
...material, $5.50-importer [Champion]: overhead, $5.10...
...But this momentum has not been sustained...
...Not surprisingly, AID officials received a similar message of disbelief from Nike's top official in Indonesia after the strike wave and the attendant bad publicity...
...Eventually, such a no-nonsense strategy would undermine the booming Corporate Social Responsibility industry...
...Until recently, Spence was the dean of Stanford's business school-holding a chair endowed by and named after Nike co-founder Phil Knight...
...profit, $1.75-retailer [UCONN Co-Op]: overhead, $14.49...
...Tweaking our foreign assistance priorities, revising "democracy promotion," and undertaking diplomacy from a community organizer's perspectivethese changes in U.S...
...profit, $4.50...
...Use of the logo was 80 cents, and the royalty to the National Collegiate Athletic Association was 57 cents...
...How many factory inspections were done last year...
...It is surprising how little we know about how industrial relations play out in the world's exportprocessing zones-even after twenty years of press reports and activists' campaigns...
...Nevertheless, in 2007-2008, Nike itself reported fourteen strikes in Vietnam involving tens of thousands of workers...
...Embassy staff, I was told that a buzz went around the room: "We're helping who to do what...
...Only last year, an awardwinning television expos‚ interviewed Bangladeshi and Vietnamese workers producing Nike T-shirts in Malaysia in familiar, appalling conditions exacerbated by ruthless labor contractors...
...But this does not rule out a wide-ranging set of initiatives that would significantly empower workers...
...Particularly egregious is the recent study funded and heavily influenced by the World Bank...
...Jeff Ballinger is founder and director of Press for Change, a nonprofit human rights-campaign organization that focuses on worker rights in the developing world...
...The off-the-charts venality of these states mocked the World Bank's decade-long focus on fighting corruption...
...Violations must be punished...
...Officials might start by going after the lowhanging fruit, borrowing from the concept of "low obligational ante" developed by Abram and Antonia Chayes in their writings about getting respect for international agreements across a wide spectrum of countries...
...That's possible, but we really have no clue as to what is actually happening...
...The shallowness and deceit of the CSR farce may be clearly observed in press reports...
...and, most important, cheated workers might win compensation, thereby emboldening other workers...
...overhead, $2.12...
...The lesson on the foreign-assistance front, then, is twofold: first, look for "empowering" projects to assist workers directly in local struggles and, second, use survey-research tools to build a database available to local legal aid groups and labor activists...
...The Financial Times, for example, ran a headline, "Nike to promote workers' rights" in mid-2007, and a news report on Nike in the same paper the very next day described "a push to promote labour rights, including the freedom to form and join trade unions...
...A Chinese group released a report in 2007 that underscored this point...
...Its report concludes that workers have to sacrifice even more than they have already in the name of economic growth...
...policy would at least begin an assault on global sweatshop practices...
...Interviews with workers uncovered widespread dissatisfaction and distrust towards the current union" (China Labor News Translations...
...The backstory is interesting...
...When the grant was discussed at a twice-monthly meeting where the Jakarta USAID Mission reported to U.S...
...How many labor inspectors are there...
...Nearly all the academic literature on the subject claims that foreign investors pay better wages than local firms...
...Several workers debunked the claim, but again, there is no reliable data on enforcement...
...Obama could make a very significant contribution to an urgent global problem for which the Bush administration spent upward of $500 million without much effect-"Trafficking in Persons...
...firms...
...This is the real CSR at work, and it goes a long way toward explaining the failure, so far, of anti-sweatshop activism...
...For comparison purposes, the United States has 750 inspectors for 130 million workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act...
...For example, a recent law change regarding severance pay in Colombia addresses the most recent wage-cheating tactic employed by multinationals (declaring bankruptcy and skipping out on substantial payments due to workers...
...Workers' rights should be a fundamental principle undergirding both "democracy promotion" and our public diplomacy endeavors...
...funded by the Laborers' International Union of North America...
...Hence the need for "special zones" with reduced protections-at best, somewhere in between the formal sector and "informal" destitution...
...when the wage was $2.47-after five years of agitation-the footwear and apparel giant had more than 110,000 workers making products for export...
...It is clear that a new architecture of rights must be erected, beginning with a no-nonsense survey of current practices...
...If so, when is the last time a report was sent to Geneva...
...Another example of misinformation is the work of Columbia University's Jagdish Bhagwati, who, in 2000, induced 250 other economists to sign an open letter to college presidents, urging them not to give in to anti-sweatshop students' demands because "the net result would be shifts in employment that will worsen the collective welfare of the very workers in poor countries who are supposed to be helped...
...How many back pay awards were made...
...Those businesses whose executives do not attendbut are reliably implicated-should go to the top of the "watch list...
...We need to know how this is working out...
...This fact did not restrain the Bush team's fiery rhetorical pronouncements: the United States and its allies would "stop at nothing to end the debasement of our fellow men and women...the defeat of human trafficking is the great moral calling of our time...
...These standards should apply to governments that oversee vast export-processing zones, as well as to dictators bent on nuclear extortion...
...It would be simple for the State Department to organize a briefing on "trafficking" for all corporations that know or suspect that similarly vulnerable workers may be producing products anywhere along their supply chains...
...It is time to forgo the rhetoric and think about practical efforts to stop human trafficking, with reliable benchmarks on our progress...
...COMMENTS AND OPINIONS Finding an anti-sweatshop strategy that works JEFF BALLINGER That nearly twenty years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught is suggested by the cost breakdown of a $37.99 University of Connecticut hoodie that appeared in the Hartford Courant a couple of years ago: the workers received a mere 18 cents, while the university received $2.28 in licensing fees...
...the number of strikes quadrupled, and the minimum wage rose steadily...
...The new administration needs to connect with real labor activists, in Asia and Central America especially, and allow them to speak for themselves...
...Similarly, on the environmental side, statistics need to be collected on factories visited, citations, and types of hazardous waste...
...What is the number of violations found...
...It didn't...
...Obama said before twenty thousand people at Prague Castle, "Rules must be binding...
...Organized as the Commission on Growth and Development, it made the astonishing discovery that the developing world's workers are overprotected...
...Alongside the raw numbers, wiki-style narratives should be included on such issues as freedom for NGOs operating in the labor sector, labor history, recent strikes, opinions on the adequacy of the minimum wage, academic papers on all these issues, and contact information for unions and activist groups...
...For weary observers of corporate-dominated globalization, it will come as little surprise that the coordinator of the World Bank's aforementioned growth commission is economist Michael Spence...
...A 2007 Brookings Institution publication similarly prescribes "ease of hiring and firing" as a primary "condition for maximizing growth...
...He suggested that I develop a project to monitor compliance with this inadequate minimum: were the workers even receiving 87 cents...
...In reality, there is no collective bargaining going on at any shoe or apparel factories in the developing world...
...it's a good bet that the number of lawyers and consultants employed dwarfs the number of organized crime leaders captured...
...As a result of the publicity, workers began an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes that resulted in much-improved compliance numbers...
...The benefits of such a strategy are threefold: Local governments in Asia and elsewhere would see U.S...
...local NGOs would see an administration unafraid to antagonize U.S...
...In less than a year, I had approval for a grant of well over $600,000 for survey work that reached 172,000 workers...
...The overall findings were praised in a Wall Street Journal article arguing that "there is room for countries to ape the Chinese model...
...The discovery of 44 percent noncompliance in 250 Jakartaarea workplaces was shocking and-to our great surprise and delight-avidly reported in the (mostly Suharto-controlled) newspapers...
...Working conditions have deteriorated noticeably, and the trade union is doing more or less nothing to further workers' interests...
...A 2006 New York Times story out of China, for example, quoted a Communist Party report that asserted that there were 20,000 labor inspectors, 1.2 million audits, and over 8 million back-pay awards in 2005...
...now is the time to change the signals...
...the Dominican Republic has trained lawyers to act as labor standards inspectors, but not in the familiar command-and-control mode, rather as mediators...
...When my boss visited Jakarta, I described to him the radical inadequacy of the local minimum wage of 87 cents per day...
...U.S.-based companies importing more that $50 million worth of goods should have to post these findings on their corporate Web sites-in both English and the local language-for every country in which they have more than three contract factories...
...But the numbers from Indonesia tell a different story: when the wage was 87 cents a day, Nike had 20,000 contract laborers there...
...embassy officials visiting cheated and abused workers...
...For over ten years, it has been common knowledge that foreign workers are being shipped across national boundaries to do factory work, often making products for export...
...How many prosecutions were started...
...There is, of course, a lot of misinformation circulating, in addition to our common lack of information...
...Words must mean something...
...The boilerplate nostrums involving multiparty democracy and clean government made little practical sense when China, pre-reform Indonesia, and Vietnam were experiencing growth rates in the double digit range...
...Addressing the rule of law as applied to the workplace ought to be a slam-dunk for the president and our recently re-energized State Department, even given the fact that such a worker-advocacy platform may discomfit countries such as China (our banker), Turkey (prone to nationalist tantrums), and Bangladesh (which has a host of stability concerns), just to name a few...
...The workers' share could hardly have been lower when the movement began...
...Currently he is at work on a Ph.D...
...He worked for a decade in Asia for the AFL-CIO and has been active with the needle trades unions...
...The approach should be informed by the same caution that a community organizer uses to size up a neighborhood in distress, buffeted by multiple external and internal forces...
...What is most needed is information about dysfunctional governance, which has previously been unavailable to them...
...At an appropriate venue-such as a gathering of trade unionists and labor rights activists in Mexico or Thailand-Obama should outline the ways in which workers are grievously disadvantaged in the global economy...
...How to explain, then, the fact that 85 percent of the 720 strikes in Vietnam last year were at foreign-investment factories...
...That the boiler plate wasn't serious was signaled in many ways...
...Every labor attach‚ or labor reporting officer at an American embassy should compile the following facts: Has the country signed International Labor Organization Convention 81 (Labor Inspection...
...For far too long, autocratic regimes have been getting conflicting advice from American policy makers...
...My talks with workers there in early 2008 confirmed my long-held suspicion that local firms were less abusive and less likely to cheat workers...
...Mexican factory: profit, 70 cents...
...Again, Bulgaria appears to be quite serious about labor inspection and tracking worker complaints to authorities-we should pay attention to such initiatives...
...Such a program would make possible a global dialogue about key issues...
Vol. 56 • July 2009 • No. 3
