Fifteen cents an hour, 70 to 80 hours a week, no overtime pay, no benefits, no child care, a good beating if you don't like it and you only have to borrow around $4,000 to secure the position: horrendous human rights violation, or better than it could be?
Sweatshops, as I've found in working on the Dartmouth Greens' tag-cutting project, are a touchy issue here, and many of us have seen too many heartstring-pullers like my opening sentence. At the same time, dismissing others' pain as a result of "different standards" without recognition of our own influence creates a nicely apathetic culture that precludes any positive change. At least, that's my opinion from the hundreds of times I've heard the following arguments:
"It sounds bad, but that's just because you're American." The idea here is that yes, sweatshops suck, but they're developing nations, and they have to go through it -- sort of an initiation into the world market. It's better than unemployment, and small developing countries who have no technology (which is their fault, obviously wait a minute) have to make do by slicing labor costs so they have something to offer, a "comparative advantage." However, if you think that'll pull them out of poverty, think again. In 1997, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reported that wages for unskilled workers had dropped by 20 to 30 percent in developing countries that had liberalized trade laws to attract manufacturing business from developed countries. Without any kind of restraint, tapping a country's poorest for their labor becomes inescapable exploitation, something that helps no worker and no economy.
"It's just the way it is, companies have to compete." Is living in desperately poor conditions under routine violation of national and international law better than unemployment? Absolutely. Can it be improved upon? Yes. As Scholars Against Sweatshop Labor, a coalition of 470 economists and political scientists, including a Nobel Laureate in Economics (Lawrence Klein), two former U.S. Labor Secretaries (Ray Marshall and Robert Reich), and a former Minister of both Finance and Planning in Somalia (Ibrahim Samater), points out, "as long as consumers in wealthier countries are willing to pay somewhat higher retail prices to ensure that garments are produced under non-sweatshop conditions -- as recent polling data for the United States suggests is the case -- the higher revenues within the industry could be used to improve workplace conditions and wages for production-level workers, without creating pressures for manufacturers to reduce their number of employees."
"But companies will just pull out." A quick economic analysis of the impact a living wage would have on clothing companies shows that they should stop whining and pay up. For example, Dr. Robert Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, finds that employers could painlessly withstand a higher-wage bill. A men's shirt retailing for $32 in the United States costs $4.74 to produce in the free-trade zones in Mexico, where sweatshops are prevalent. Of that amount, 52 cents goes to production workers and another 52 cents to supervisors.
"You could double the production workers' wages, and hardly anyone but the workers would be able to tell the difference," Pollin argues. And American Apparel and Zara (one of the largest European clothing chains) have proven this theory, producing with well-paid workers and small advertising budget, and offering a quality product.
Unfortunately, the threat of shut-down factories is a real one, since corporations work through subcontractors and find it easiest to pull out of any situation that looks like it could bring them bad PR (like where workers start talking to the press about their working conditions). This is very effective at shutting up employees who can't afford to lose their jobs, and points activists toward the single most important goal of any anti-sweatshop campaign: Transparency. (Nike, for example, has 541 factories around the world, and will only give the locations of 42 of them. What's going on in the other 499?)
I will say that again: It's transparency that's key. It's not a living wage, because we can't calculate that accurately for every country in the world. But once a company reveals where their operations take place, abusive situations are brought out in the open and multinationals can no longer turn their heads, denying that they know what goes on to produce their clothes.
This works. In the late 1990's, Nike cleaned up its act in Mexico. Last year, The Gap, Target, J. C. Penny's and 23 other American companies agreed one by one to a landmark $20 million class action settlement in the U.S. Commonwealth of the North Mariana Islands (including Saipan), guaranteeing better wages, independent unions and independent monitoring. Earlier this month, The New York Times reported that a major factory in the Dominican Republic had been kept open and unionized as a result of pressure on Nike and Reebok from United Students Against Sweatshops. The campaigns have only helped because violations of international and national labor laws were brought out into the open, and workers were free to speak and fight for themselves. They don't need us to boycott when they can unionize on their own, but they can't unionize until we call their multinational employers out and make them own up to their responsibilities.
