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A recent Cornell University graduate, Jordan Wells is the Sweatfree Coordinator with the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, an organization that was instrumental in one of the biggest news events of 2009 for the sweatfree movement- New York State's decision to join the national Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium.

Ethix Merch: The anti-sweatshop movement is at an exciting juncture. The Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium-- a joint effort among cities and states to support the emergence of truly sweatfree factories--is moving forward. Can you briefly describe the process of how you and your colleagues persuaded the State of New York to become the eighth official member of the consortium?

Jordan Wells:

It helps to be on the right side of a given policy issue. As long as Nicholas Kristof (who continually presents the false sweatshops-or-nothing dichotomy) doesn't hold elective office in New York State, I think we'll be in good shape there.

But being right is only the start. We  also needed the impetus for the state to take action (i.e. Why now?). The impetus sprang from SweatFree Communities' "Subsidizing Sweatshops" reports and the accompanying media coverage, which clearly linked New York apparel purchases (and therefore tax dollars) with sweatshops around the world.

To ensure that the state would follow through, we employed alliances with the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), UNITE HERE (later Workers United), and other labor and faith organizations. Also, we patiently and exhaustively explained and re-explained what a sweatfree code of conduct and membership in the Sweatfree Purchasing Consortium would mean for New York. Lastly, we mostly cooperated with the procedure and timeline offered by the state, while still avoiding compromising sweatfree principles.

Ethix Merch:  What does it mean to you personally to have played such a big part in the victory?

Jordan Wells: 

I am very pleased to have had the opportunity of helping build toward this victory. It is gratifying to hear from other sweatfree campaigns that this will help spur their city/state decision-makers along.

Ethix Merch: Your organization, the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State, is one of many faith-based groups deeply engaged in anti-sweatshop work. For you, what's the connection between religion and sweatshops?

Jordan Wells: 

Faith communities have and will always have a responsibility to bear witness both to the injustices present in our every day and to exploitation hidden from view. While much of civil society takes a fatalistic posture toward sweatshops--accepting them as the inevitable result of globalization and development--the religious recognize abuse of workers as a moral failing that we can and must correct.

Ethix Merch: As a fairly recent college graduate, do you have a sense that sweatshops are an urgent and important issue on campuses? Are students basically familiar with the problem?

Jordan Wells: 

It depends on the campus, among other factors.  My sense is that students are more familiar with this issue than their predecessors, but that familiarity sometimes may lead to a strange complacency. As tuition rises across the nation, student loans become unsustainably burdensome, and job opportunities decline, I think issues closer to home will be foremost on students' minds; thoughtful analysis would show that these problems and sweatshop labor have several root causes in common.

Ethix Merch: Please tell us a little bit about your work with Justice for Farmworkers. What should our readers know?

Jordan Wells: 

The Justice for Famworkers Campaign seeks the removal of the legal exclusions that have denied generations of New York farmworkers the basic rights and protections enjoyed by other workers, including the right to overtime pay, a weekly day of rest, collective bargaining protections, and coverage under the state's temporary disability insurance program. These shameful exclusions are rooted in a Jim Crow-era compromise, in which Dixiecrats prevailed upon Congress to exempt farm and domestic workers (both primarily African American workforces) from coverage under the New Deal labor laws; the southerners' explicitly stated purpose was to prevent black workers from being put on an equal footing with their white counterparts.  Seventy-five years later, New York's mostly Latino farmworker population continues to toil without basic rights and protections.

The Farmworkers Fair Labor Practices Act, currently pending before the legislature, would deliver major advances in farmworker rights. For more information, check out (and join!) our Facebook group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10396950549.

Will the health care bill help or hurt small business owners? That mainly depends on one factor: whether or not they already offer health insurance.

If you own a small business that presently offers health care, the health care bill will obviously help your profitability. A central feature of all the proposals is the creation of a national risk pool, which would eliminate the penalty small businesses face because of their tiny risk pools. This would enable small businesses to compete for labor with larger businesses, and it may even bring rates down.

Macroeconomics dictates what will happen next: the marketplace will reward employers who have already been offering health insurance. Your competitors who do not presently offer health insurance will see their costs increase at the same time yours decreases. They will respond by providing the absolute bare minimum necessary to comply with the health law, then raising prices while yours remain constant. This will result in greater market share for you, which will result in your needing to hire more employees, with benefits that exceed the bare minimum.

US Small Businesses will not become less competitive, because we already can't compete with countries that have lower labor costs. An 8% increase in labor costs will not make us less likely to take business away from a factory in China where workers earn $40 per month. US Small Businesses compete with each other--and if they all have to offer health insurance nothing will change except that their workers, and our economy, will be healthier. A recent government imposition of health regulation that was bitterly fought by small business may provide a glimpse into the future: when New York City banned smoking in bars and restaurants, their owners predicted the end of Manhattan nightlife. Guess what--people adjusted. Quickly. Given no choice, people gave up smoking inside but not drinking. The model has proliferated nationwide.

If you don't offer health care to your employees, that means one of three things:

1) You are bad at math: your employees are paying for their own health care with after-tax money. Which means you have to pay them at least $1200 (which costs you a minimum of $1400 after employer taxes and workers comp) for them to be able to afford an $800 per month policy. In the short run, your expenses will increase--but you will be able to adjust income for new hires and your existing employees will end up having far more discretionary income at no extra cost to you. Unfortunately, you didn't understand what I just said, and that blonde lady on Fox say "health care bill bad".

2) You are great at math: your employees are on Medicare or some other form of public assistance--which means other businesses are paying for your workers' health insurance. That's a great deal that I can't blame small businesses for fighting to keep. Unfortunately, the present system will bankrupt our country in the near future. You will likely find a way to punish your workers for this, but since you are probably paying minimum wage it will take a while for you to recoup these funds. You know exactly what you are fighting against, and your employees are also fighting against this bill because they see it as a battle between the Medicare they already have, and the hurt The Man will bring down on them if he has to pay for your insurance.

3) You see your employees as unskilled and replaceable. That might actually be the case--because the employees you'd want to retain are working at some other company that offers health insurance. But that is never the case with "the job"--as I've learned owning a small business, showing up for work on time, the ability to be trained and improve on your own, and working well with others is a skill that is increasingly rare in America. Or, you are the only game in town--most likely a small town in the Southeast. Either way your employees have no health insurance. They come to work sick, or miss more work than they need to, or switch jobs as soon as they need health insurance. Short term bad, long term good.

It might help to understand why businesses began offering health insurance in the first place. Back in the day of The Organization Man, when tax rates for executives exceeded 50%, health insurance was a non taxable perk that actually paid for itself by keeping key men healthy. When tax rates began falling, company provided health care was taken for granted as a perk necessary to attract talent. So health was a white collar tax shelter. Blue collar workers got their insurance courtesy of labor unions. Health insurance is still a privilege of white collar workers and unionized blue collar workers. This bill will benefit non union, blue collar workers and their families more than any other demographic. It will also hurt their employers in the short run. They'll get over it.
 

Believe it or not, the National Labor Relations Board -- the entity responsible for protecting a worker's right to collective bargaining -- has three vacant seats, and the implications for workers are mounting. With only two of five position filled, the board only takes action when both members, one Democrat and one Republican, can agree. Even those decisions are currently being challenged in court, and justly so. 

Democracy is not working as intended. In fact, in regard to the NLRB, democracy isn't even the right word anymore. The process has been reduced to absolute gridlock. Across the country, many workers regularly experience intimidation, firing and retribution in response to legitimate union organization activities. The NLRB is the appropriate channel for checking the outsized power of employers over those in their employ. When that channel is effectively cut off, as it has been for nearly twenty two months now, the bargaining rights that are the cornerstone of the American middle class begin to lose their meaning and relevance. After all, it's not what's written in the law books that matters, it's the facts on the ground. 

Clearly, President Obama's NLRB appointees are being used as political pawns. In reality, the stalled confirmation hearings are about two things, both unrelated to the actual qualifications of the nominees. First, the constant delays constitute retribution for similar delays that Democrats put in place for President Bush's NLRB appointments. And second, the delays are an opportunity for Republicans, from their minority position, to throw a wrench into whatever plans Democrats and President Obama have for governing under their clear mandate from the 2008 election.

I think most people would agree that neither of these are good enough reasons to prevent the Senate from voting on the President's duly appointed nominees for such crucial positions. So where does that leave us? What is the way forward toward ensuring that an entire generation of employers don't feel entitled to harass workers who are merely trying to assert their right to join together and bargain for decent wages, benefits and working conditions? 

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way forward, other than to wait for Republicans to exhaust every avenue of delay at their disposal. Maybe these delay tactics -- on this issue and many others -- will work exactly as intended. Maybe the American people will blame the resulting gridlock on the majority party, rather than on the party responsible. Maybe that will lead to yet another pendulum swing, another GOP revolution. All of that is possible, perhaps even probable because of the ingrained cynicism so many have developed toward whoever is "in power." 

Progress so often comes at a snail's pace. To impact the rate of change, so we don't always have to settle for tiny victories, progressives may actually have to wait until we're in the minority again. At that point, we can choose to set a new precedent of not using every conceivable tool to foil the plans of the majority. As Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and Mohandas Gandhi all showed, sometimes you can't move forward until you lay down your arms. 

Day after day, the debate over health care reform dominates the media's political coverage. Which is to be expected, considering the political stakes and the intense need to do something about our broken system.

But while the debate in congress rages on, it's sometimes easy to lose track of what the rest of the government is up to. While congress is busy trying to make new laws, it falls to the vast executive branch to enforce the laws already on the books.

The Department of Labor -- headed by an energetic Hilda Solis -- seems to be getting serious about doing just that. Ms. Solis recently announced the department's intention to hire 250 new wage and hour investigators. This was big news...something that was unthinkable between, say, 2001 and 2008. 250 investigators multiplied by 40 hours per week makes 520,000 additional hours of work per year spent ensuring that employers adhere to the federal minimum wage and hour laws. 

The implications for sweatshops in the United States are obvious. Wage and hour violations are a sweatshop's bread and butter. When the threat of inspection is remote--as, indeed, it has always been for small to medium sized garment factories--factory owners break the law with impunity. But when they know that the sheriff is in town, they might not even need to hear the knock at their door to start bringing their operations up to code.

How many of the new inspectors will focus their efforts on the garment industry? That remains to be seen. However, given Ms. Solis's track record on labor issues, there is reason to be optimistic.

In a sign that the labor department understands the inter-connection of the global labor market, it also recently announced new grants totaling about $59 million to combat exploitive child labor in 19 countries around the world. An additional $6.4 million will be spent on projects "promoting adherence to international core labor standards." In other words, the department seems to be asking, why should we spend the time and energy it takes to clean up our own factories, if business will simply move overseas in search of ultra-cheap products made possible only by exploitation? Very clearly, only an international approach has the potential to end the long nightmare for garment workers, and it is tremendously exciting that the U.S. Department of Labor can see the forest for the trees.

It is 10 months into the Obama administration and advocates for social and economic justice are finally beginning to realize what has happened. We have a president in office who cares about the working poor, and who has billions of dollars and a vast government bureaucracy at his disposal. Congress may be very slow in turning its wheels toward justice, but there are other tools, and these tools are being weilded skillfully, if often under the radar.

We'll continue to try and highlight some of the good news coming out of the DOL, the EPA, and any other federal agencies with power to improve people's lives and create genuine equality of opportunity.

As always, remember how important it is to support domestic, sweatshop-free, union factories. Without viable alternatives to sweatshops, lawmakers find it difficult if not impossible to effectively ban worker exploitation.

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Huffington Post, and American Prospect. From 1984-92 he served as senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn. He is chair of the Horizon Institute, an LA-based think tank. He also serves on the boards of several organizations, including the LA Alliance for a New Economy , the Liberty Hill Foundation, the National Housing Institute, and the Southern CA Assn for Nonprofit Housing.

Ethix Merch: To follow up on your article in The Nation about the dispute between Workers United and UNITE HERE... what have you learned about the state of garment-factory organizing? Since the merger, UNITE-HERE seemed to have stopped organizing garment factories, but now that Workers United has broken off, they’ve organized workers from the old Eagle Factory in New Bedford, MA.

Do you believe that there is a future for the garment industry in the United States, and are you excited about Workers United organizing more garment factories here?

Peter Dreier:

The garment industry’s heyday was in the middle and early part of the twentieth century in the United States. Beginning in the fifties and sixties and accelerating in the seventies, our industry began to move first to the anti-union south and then overseas, in part because it’s such a labor intensive industry…And so we’ve seen a dramatic, overwhelming decline in the number of garment and textile workers in the United States, and I don’t see any sign that that’s going to reverse itself.

The nature of the garment industry in the United States is that the factories and sewing shops are relatively small, with a few exceptions like American Apparel in Los Angeles. Most are subcontractors that employ ten or a hundred people, often undocumented immigrants. The truth is that enforcement of labor and hour laws means that the subcontractors close up shop and move somewhere else under a different name.

Although there may be pockets of union success in the next decade or so, I don’t think that’s where Workers United will see its growth. Its growth will be in industrial laundries and other sectors.

Ethix Merch:  In June, you wrote an article for The Huffington Post about the large-scale effort to boycott the Russell Corporation. In the article you mentioned the possibility of NBA players getting involved in the dispute over the ethical implications of their uniforms. Has any progress been made on this front since your article? How is the USAS campaign going?

Peter Dreier: 

I wrote an article in The Nation called “Where are the Jocks for Justice?” It’s extremely disappointing that athletes, whether they come from poor areas or middle class families, are in a bubble world where it’s hard for them to break out and get involved in social activism. Every once-in-a-while you hear about people like Carlos Delgado and Adonal Foyle, but they are rare exceptions. There’s a wonderful sportswriter named David Zirin, who writes for The Nation about the link between sports and politics. He occasionally writes about examples of pro and amateur athletes taking stands on controversial social and political issues.

Unless you can get high profile athletes or the players union involved, it’s not going to happen. A few years back I was trying to get the baseball players union to take a stand on sweatshops -- for example, their baseballs are made in a sweatshop in Costa Rica, and some of their uniforms are made in sweatshops. But the players union wasn't interested. Most of the players are like spoiled brats. There are exceptions, but those players don’t control the union.

Ethix Merch: Boycotts are one of the most important tools available to workers and their allies.. Do you think that the movement uses boycotts effectively?

Peter Dreier: 

There are two dilemmas with boycotting. First, you risk taking business away from the workers you’re trying to help. Second, if the boycott isn’t well publicized, the management can intimidate workers and tell them the union is trying to take away their jobs. The only time a boycott works is if the workers themselves understand the risk and encourage their allies and consumers to do it when they think they’re at a point of their organizing campaign where a boycott or a threat of a boycott can make a difference. Cesar Chavez understood that and Marshall Ganz’s book about the United Farm Workers union ("Why David Sometimes Wins") talks about that. The boycott against the major agricultural growers in California was successful because it was a coordinated action with the union and consumers. It has to be a part of a larger strategy, and sometimes it can work.

Ethix Merch: Recently, you gave a speech about the state of the California budget. Budget deficits aren’t unique to California, of course, and low-income folks are suffering from resulting cuts in services. Increasing taxes on the wealthy to raise government revenue and protect the public safety net seems to be politically very difficult if not impossible. What do you think needs to happen to ensure that, in tough economic times like these, critical social service programs are protected?

Peter Dreier: 

The biggest obstacle to raising taxes on the rich is the political clout of rich individuals and businesses. That is always the case whenever you’re trying to do something progressive, and progressive taxation is a part of that. All politics is about organized money against organized people. (Sometimes you can have both. The NRA has both. Labor unions sometimes have both.)

The second obstacle is the mythology about what we mean by a “healthy business climate.” Whenever you say you’re going to raise taxes on the rich, big business and rich people say they’re going to move, they’ll destroy the tax base and the upper middle class will leave the city, the state, or even the country. 75 to 80 percent of the time they’re crying wolf, but sometimes they’re not. Political leaders, even Barack Obama, sometimes don’t know when they’re bluffing. If you regulate the pharmaceutical industry and reduce their profits, will they stop doing innovative research? No. But if you repeat a lie often enough people start to believe it.

A third obstacle is that when you talk about taxing the rich, middle class people think you’re talking about them. Progressive taxation and government in general has to recover from thirty years of Reaganism. We haven’t yet recovered. Obama’s victory and his ability to communicate has helped to do that, but he’s fighting an uphill fight to restore the legitimacy of government as part of the solution. For example, Obama wants to raise taxes on families earning over $350,000 to pay for his health care plan. That's less than 2% of the population. You'd think that would be a no-brainer. But even some Democrats in Congress oppose this kind of progressive taxation. Either they think (wrongly) that this will hurt the business climate, or they are just in the pockets of the rich who give them campaign contributions -- or a bit of both.

The role of progressives is to change the political climate to make it easier for Obama to be successful. Obama is doing what he can to get his legislation passed. It’s not easy. Some leftists think that Obama doesn’t have enough backbone. That’s B.S.. Basically it’s a strategic question, how do you calculate the opposition and what do you need to do to overcome it. Obama warned people, during the campaign, that it’s not going to be easy to pass health care reform, labor law reform, climate change legislation, and other bold reforms, because there are a lot of powerful forces lined up against it. Our job is to make it easier for Obama to do his job, by changing the political climate.

Is the Fair Trade movement doing better in Europe than in the United States?

The question came up during an interesting conversation I had recently with a representative from the UK-based "Bags of Ethics" fair trade tote bag company. She insisted that while it is still difficult to find sweatshop-free and fairly traded merchandise in the United States, the situation is very different in Western Europe, where a wide variety of fair trade certified products are available on the market.

The idea--that such a large region of the world is suddenly awash in fair trade goods--sounded amazing to me, but perhaps a bit too good to be true. So I decided to do some internet sleuthing about the state of ethically-produced goods in Europe.

I started by visiting Harrods.com, homepage of the most famous department store in London. (If fair trade merch really is taking hold in Western Europe, it would surely be sold at Harrods, right?) As it happens, though, the front page links to the latest Ralph Lauren collection. Yes, that's Polo Ralph Lauren, the American design company whose "responsible shopper profile" at GreenAmerica looks a lot like the other garment industry corporate giants...full of allegations and business decisions that speed up, rather than slow down, the global "race to the bottom." Certainly no mention of fair trade. Looks like business as usual at Harrod's.

My next step was to compare the websites of TransfairUSA (Transfair), with its global parent organization, the Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO). The list of fair trade certified products is the same on both sites, with one very interesting exception: cotton. The FLO website lists hundreds of traders and producers of fair trade certified "seed cotton," whereas TransfairUSA lists none. So, is it possible that consumers in other parts of the world are now easily able to purchase clothes made from fair trade cotton? 

To try and answer that question, I googled "fair trade clothing," in both Google and Google UK search engines. This excercise is complicated by the fact that it is the cotton that gets certified, not the process of cutting and sewing the cotton into finished garments. In other words, neither Transfair nor FLO certifies fair trade apparel. So, at this point in the evolution of fair trade, it's up to consumers to judge each "fair trade" claim on its own merits, based on the information provided by the company.

That said, it does definitely seem to me that the fair trade options in England are much more extensive than the American-based options, and also more likely to claim that their cotton, at least, is FLO certified. Take a look at a few of these UK-based websites with a "fair trade" claim.

Piccalilly Hot Cotton

People Tree

Nomads Originals

The fashions available on these sites seem pretty mainstream, which suggests to me that they're appealing to the mainstream consumer in the UK, rather than someone looking for something "ethnic." Of course, if fair trade merch is really going to take off, it will need to compete both in terms of price AND fashion. 

Stateside, Fair Indigo definitely holds its own. And, in what looks to be very exciting news, they say they are working with Transfair on a pilot project to certify some of their finished products, which would be a huge leap forward.

Personally, I can't wait until that starts to happen. As time goes on, please keep checking back with us as we expand our fair trade options and offer more information about how to distinguish fair trade superstars from fair trade pretenders. In the meantime, its important to remember that Union Made in USA merchandise is still the platinum standard for consumers in the United States. With the Union label, you're supporting local economies, helping maintain middle class manufacturing jobs, and helping to stop the race to the bottom on global labor conditions.

Why not order some Union Made T-shirts for your organization right now?

Julie Su is the Litigation Director at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California (APALC), an affiliate of the Washington D.C.-based Asian American Justice Center. Ms. Su was one of the leaders in fighting for the freedom of the Thai garment workers who were enslaved for years in an apartment complex in El Monte, California and served as lead counsel in a federal lawsuit against the garment manufacturers and retailers whose clothes they sewed.

Ethix Merch: The slave labor case in El Monte, California is probably the most notorious example of sweatshop abuse in modern American history. (Allow us to be the latest in a long line of people to thank you for the amazing work you did to help free the victims.) Are there more recent examples that anti-sweatshop advocates should have at their fingertips when discussing the continued existence of sweatshops in the United States?

Julie Su:

Unfortunately, sweatshops in the United States remain a reality in many industries, including the garment industry.  Today, Los Angeles is the sweatshop capital of the U.S., where garment workers sew for long hours, often without meal and rest breaks and often for less than the minimum wage.  They almost invariably work overtime but these hours are not reflected in the time cards of the factory or in the pay workers receive.  The U.S. Department of Labor's last study about this was nearly 10 years ago but at that time, over 60% of Los Angeles factories were found to violate basic wage and hour protections for workers.  Over 90% were found to have health and safety violations detrimental to workers' well-being.  These statistics are unacceptable and they demonstrate that sweatshops are not aberrations in an otherwise lawful industry.  They are a way of doing business.

 

Even during the El Monte case, I was afraid that the horrific conditions endured by the Thai garment workers would set a new low, would make the routine sweatshop conditions seem tame by comparison and therefore, would make it harder to push for higher standards in the industry as a whole.  People would say, "maybe the conditions aren't perfect but at least the workers aren't held behind barbed wire as they were in El Monte." After the El Monte case, we at the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, working together with our allies, brought a number of cases involving such sweatshop conditions.  We represented immigrant Asian and Latino workers against companies including bebe, BCBG, and XOXO using the same theory, that manufacturers and retailers at the top of the garment industry food chain are responsible for the conditions in which their clothes are made.  We represented a group of Latino workers who sewed jackets, including university apparel, right here in L.A. and we drew strength from the fabulous student movement that has grown up to leverage university power to demand decent working conditions.  Perhaps the most publicized case was the one in which we represented Latino garment workers against Forever 21. These workers labored in different factories but all were paid less than their lawful wages and endured terrible verbal abuse and inhumanely long hours.  The workers launched a 3-year campaign against Forever 21, which was covered in the Emmy-award winning documentary, "Made in L.A."   Finally, a few years after El Monte, several nonprofit workers' rights organizations sued over a dozen manufacturers and retailers producing garments in the U.S. territory of Saipan. Those garments were sold with "Made in the U.S.A." labels but the workers, mostly from China and the Phillippines, were forced to live, sleep, eat and work in abject poverty without any of the federal labor law protections that exist in other parts of the U.S.

I think it's critically important to know that the fight against sweatshops in Los Angeles and in the U.S. did not begin and end with El Monte.  But El Monte lit a fire and exposed the standard practices of the industry -- and the dangers when we look the other way and pretend they don't exist -- in a way that galvanized the anti-sweatshop movement.  Incidentally, there is happy news to report for the El Monte workers, the majority of whom became U.S. citizens last year (2008).  It was an incredible moment in their long and often very difficult journey toward achieving the dreams that brought them to the United States in the first place.

Ethix Merch: After all these years, do you think most people understand that sweatshops still exist in the United States? If not, why hasn’t the message sunk in?

Julie Su:

I definitely think people are more aware of sweatshops in the U.S. than they were, say, 15 years ago.  When I started this work in 1994, the campaign against Jessica McClintock, led by the brave Chinese workers from Oakland and the Oakland-based Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) and the Los Angeles-based Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance (KIWA), was in full swing.  Activists, workers,  and students regularly picketed outside of the Jessica McClintock boutique at the corner of Wilshire and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and when people saw them, or took the flyers about the campaign, I often heard them say, "What sweatshops? Not here."  It is harder to claim total ignorance about the existence of sweatshops in our backyard.

 

But at the same time, I think there has been some anti-sweatshop fatigue both by the public and the media.  There was a tremendous amount of attention in the 1990s, spurred by the horror of the El Monte case and the courage of the Thai and Latino workers in that case who refused to be silent.  Soon after that, there were exposes about Kathie Lee Gifford and Disney and the conditions in which their clothes were made overseas.  And federal and state governments felt they had to do something, but the reality is that this type of change requires a fundamental challenge to the industry itself, not just fixes at the margins and window dressing.  It is not enough to enforce existing minimum wage and overtime laws without looking at the fundamental reason why sweatshops exist, which is the power exerted by corporations at the top for the cheapest labor possible and the corresponding lack of power by workers at the bottom to protect themselves. 

Shifting this balance of power, making it more equitable, more just, is difficult and faces intense resistance by those who profit from things the way they are. Some of this resistance is more institutional, like the media coverage about business and what is good for business vs. labor and what is good for workers.  It's hard to get sustained public attention to sweatshops.  Even in our cases, we started to see the media ask, "Ok, so it's another sweatshop case, what is the new angle on this story?"  Some of this relates to consumer habits, people are really devoted to fashion and if there isn't a quick answer to where they can get sweatshop-free clothes they like at prices they can afford, they'll tend to still buy whatever is available. The change needed to really eliminate sweatshop conditions requires sustained, focused efforts and resources which simply aren't there.   So while workers, activists, unions, community-based organizers and nonprofit organizations continue to do this work, the public often doesn't hear about it.

Ethix Merch: From an economic standpoint, how is the struggle of garment workers in the United States connected to that of foreign garment workers? 

Julie Su: 

The struggle for justice for garment workers in the U.S. is intimately tied to justice worldwide for workers.  Most obviously, the threat that manufacturers and retailers have always made is that if U.S. workers stand up for themselves, organize, and improve working conditions, the companies will simply ship their work to countries with even more vulnerable workers and even fewer labor law protections.  It's really quite cynical and, I think, appalling, but it is a real option for corporations in the garment industry and we saw this in the years immediately before and after the sunset of the Multi-Fibre Agreement, which made it even easier for companies to seek out the cheapest labor anywhere in the world.  It led to a significant (though by no means complete) decrease in garment production in the U.S. 

So it is essential for working conditions everywhere to be improved to eliminate the competitive advantage that companies find by producing elsewhere.  This doesn't mean that every worker has to be paid the same wage, but it does mean that there should be living wage standards across the globe that ensure that someone who works in a garment factory can make enough to live, to eat, to have shelter, education, health, and some leisure. 

From a justice perspective, it is obvious that the crushing poverty faced by so many workers who sew garments violates our most basic notions of human rights.  We cannot pay attention to one group of workers in one country without understanding the interconnectedness of all the workers on whose backs billions of dollars in clothing are sold each year.

Ethix Merch: Why did Sweatshop Watch, the organization you co-founded, close its doors? Who is stepping in to do the work that was being done by SW?

Julie Su: 

Sweatshop Watch closed our doors after an amazing 15-year history of fighting with and for garment workers in the U.S. and aorund the world.  We started as a coalition of groups across the state working on anti-sweatshop efforts in the garment industry, and together, we helped pass the strongest anti-sweatshop legislation in the country, California's AB 633 (which has had multiple problems with implementation, but has also allowed hundreds of garment workers to access a speedier process of winning wages through the state labor commissioner and has also been the model for legislation in other low wage industries, such as the car wash industry). 

What we found in the last few years is that the garment industry in California has changed.  Production that used to be in the Bay Area has all but left, so many of our coalition partners were no longer working in the garment industry.  In this economy, funding was a challenge.  We realized that it made sense to go back to the roots of why we started Sweatshop Watch in the first place, which was to support the organizing and advocacy efforts of garment workers in the U.S., and this work would have to happen in Los Angeles.  We decided that using limited resources to sustain a statewide coalition didn't make sense, but everyone involved in Sweatshop Watch remains very committed to having the work carried on by APALC.

Ethix Merch: Can you tell us a little bit more about the work that APALC is currently doing?

Julie Su: 

Over the last few years, APALC has been trying to do more research on the state of the local garment industry.  There have been many changes, including, for example, the distribution of work by a single manufacturer across many different contractors (we believe this is in part a response to our lawsuits which demonstrated that if one factory was completely dependent on a single manufacturer, this helped prove that the manufacturer exercised control over working conditions in that factory and helped establish liability of the manufacturer).  We have also been very interested, particluarly in the last 2 years, in identifying companies who want to partner with us in raising standards in the garment industry and actively working to combat sweatshops.  We have also reached out to City officials to try and launch a "Made in L.A." marketing campaign that would harness the power of Los Angeles production -- there are strong reasons production has decreased everywhere else in the country but the L.A. industry remains vibrant. 

Biodegradable:

I think everyone has a basic understanding of what this once jargon-y term means by now. (Way to go, all you environmental crusaders!) The question is, though, how big a factor should it be in your eco-friendly purchasing decision?

Unfortunately, “biodegradable” is one of those terms that seems clear enough when you read about it in the dictionary, but becomes a real head-scratcher when it makes the leap to the free market. There don’t seem to be laws governing the commercial use of the term, so you can end up with biodegradable products on the market that biodegrade over a very, very long time or that only biodegrade under certain optimal conditions that may be unlikely to occur in practice.

Furthermore, even if something is genuinely biodegradable, that might not even be a good thing, depending on what it is that’s biodegrading! Toxins that are trapped inside a mug, for example, are probably better off staying put rather than leaching into the soil or the water table.

In a way, the term “biodegradable” is a relic from the early days of the environmental movement. At that time, many environmentalists were just trying to get people to be aware of how much trash was being put into landfills. Since landfills are smelly eyesores, why wouldn’t you want things to biodegrade? Now we know that the existence of landfills is the least of our worries. Because of global warming, the viability of life on earth (as we know it) is very much in question.

So when you’re shopping around for eco-friendly products, make sure to also consider what kinds of energy went into creating the product, what the product is actually made from, and whether or not the product is recyclable.

If you're looking for a product that goes beyond biodegradable, check out the new Vision USA Biomugs. They're biodegradable, recyclable, as well as BPA & Lead Free, not to mention Union Made in the USA. Click the image for details.

Next up on "Eco-Friendly Buzzwords," Bamboo: Better than Cotton or Just the Latest Advancement in Greenwashing? 
 

In far too many cases, clothes that come with a "Made in USA" tag are cut and sewn by workers toiling in American sweatshops, characterized by many of the same entrenched abuses as are seen in sweatshops in the developing world.

"Made in LA," a film about garment workers in Los Angeles, documents the struggle of three Latina sweatshop workers as they bravely stand up to demand basic labor protections that should be available to them by law.

The film is an incredibly powerful reminder--not just of the existence of U.S. sweatshops--but of the equalizing effect that unions can have in the epic battle between workers and retail giants. These giants (Forever 21, in the case of the "Made in LA" workers) have the luxury of turning a blind eye to exploitation in their subcontractor factories, because they technically don't own the factory. 

That, however, is a poor excuse. The biggest reason why factory owners exploit their workers is that the price paid to them by retailers is so incredibly low.

Is this a government enforcement problem? Well, yes and no. Even if the government somehow came up with the funds for a ten-fold expansion of labor law enforcement, sweatshops would persist, because they can close down and spring up again virtually overnight, under a different name. Also, since sweatshops are an industry norm and not an exception, the government would be bogged down by having to prosecute violations in virtually every factory it visits.

Instead of enforcing the law factory by factory, it would be much more efficient to hold retailers responsible for what happens in subcontractor factories. Retailers make the big profits, and they are the ones, ultimately, with the power to end the abuses and bring justice to the industry.

Until retail corporations are held liable for sweatshop conditions, unions are the best and often the only tool that workers have to bring their exploitation into the light where there is a chance, at least, for resolution to the most serious abuses. "Made in LA" does an amazing job of demonstrating how essential it is for workers to be able to organize. You can't walk away from the film believing that any of these workers could have made any headway alone against the factory or against Forever 21.

The action items for today's blog entry are 1) to watch the film tonight on PBS and 2) look for ways to support unions, including searching EthixMerch.com for union made logo items for your organization, school, event, or business.

The Obama administration has taken some nice first steps toward a more worker-friendly vision of global trade. New free trade agreements pushed by the Bush Administration, such as those with Colombia and South Korea, are apparently getting some deep re-thinking – or at least, being put on the back burner while the new Administration sorts out climate change, health care and domestic trade union rights. And refreshingly, on July 16, the new United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk announced a more proactive strategy to enforce labor provisions in existing free trade agreements. Here’s what’s new under the sun.

First, a bit of explanation about what he’s talking about. Existing free trade agreements from NAFTA on through the most recent deals require our trade partners- at least on paper- to enforce their labor laws and to try to live up to international labor standards.  So what’s so striking about USTR Kirk saying that the Administration wants to make sure existing language in our trade deals is enforced?

In truth, no prior administration has ever sought to actually take the initiative when it comes to these provisions. Instead, we have assumed that of course all our trade partners are enforcing labor rights protections- except when someone points out they aren’t. In other words, enforcement of these provisions has been carried out largely on a complaint-driven basis. This model can’t really work, as the people who are most affected- the most exploited workers in the countries with which we trade- just don’t have practical means to access the mechanisms that have been set up for filing complaints. Thus, not surprisingly, very few complaints get filed, no matter how many abuses actually occur. Even when complaints do get filed- for instance, my organization, ILRF, filed about a dozen cases on behalf of Mexican workers in the early years of NAFTA- those cases take years to resolve, and workers see little return for the effort of engaging in the process.

But there is no downside to the US Trade Representative taking a new look at how we enforce these deals- and, we hope, finding a better way to do it. Real enforcement of the labor provisions in trade deals would be a win-win for both US workers and workers overseas.  Promoting policies that protect workers in other countries makes good sense for the US, economically.  Creating decent and sustainable jobs that raise developing country workers into the middle class is a win-win for workers and businesses, as it expands markets for US and global products. That has long been the main moral argument for more global trade- although few have cared to deal with the ugly reality that many workers in export industries in these countries have been getting sweatshop jobs, not decent jobs, and have not been able, in their lifetimes, to afford the goods they are producing.

Poor working conditions in developing nations not only strip laborers in those countries of their rights, but also create unfair competition in the global labor market. This global "race to the bottom" leads to degradation of conditions, to the increase in ‘sweatshop jobs,’ here at home. We need to bring up the bottom for everyone.

It’s great that USTR Kirk wants to hold trading partners accountable for labor rights, and would be even better if the new Administration sought ways to hold investors- the multinational companies that chase cheap labor around the globe- accountable as well. This would get us past the current ‘free trade’ model to one of what we might call fair trade. For example, we should be supporting terms of trade requiring that investors who benefit from trade deals agree to a floor of decent wages and working conditions that ultimately enable workers to lift themselves out of poverty, and should reward governments that institute laws and policies to regulate ‘footloose’ investors and require companies to make long-term commitments to investments- and their workforce- in developing countries. This is in all of our long term interests.

Bama Athreya is the Executive Director of the International Labor Rights Forum.

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