Sweatfree Tribe

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.

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.

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. 

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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“Upright men and women are needed, both in politics and in the economy, people sincerely concerned for the common good.”

So says the Pope, in remarks made yesterday about his just-released “Encyclical Letter.”

The letter itself is an extraordinary document. In it, the Pope makes a plea for an economy that is not neutral to morality, but rather guided by it. As he says, “…the canons of justice must be respected from the outset, as the economic process unfolds, and not just afterwards or incidentally.”

The Pope goes on to argue that profit is not a good enough motive to drive the economy:
“Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”

The letter is revolutionary because it adds legitimacy to a vision of economic justice that seems so necessary to so many people, but that has yet to reach the “tipping point.” In calling for a moral economy, the Pope recognizes capitalism’s incredible power to innovate in any direction it chooses. Right now, it is innovating almost exclusively toward maximum profit, resulting in an ever-increasing divide between global rich and poor. We should be encouraging prosperity, the Pope argues, but for all people, not just a select few.

A lot of Catholics around the world have worked tirelessly toward the vision of economic justice that the Pope outlines in his letter. Hopefully, the Pope’s decision to dedicate an entire encyclical (just the third of his 4-year Papacy) to the importance of a moral economy will energize and magnify the voices of progressive Catholics. And it may also impact the direction of Catholicism in general. If Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, she’ll be the sixth Catholic out of nine Justices. About a quarter of the U.S. senators are Catholic.

But the Pope’s moral authority extends beyond Catholics. It’s clear that in order for the economy to begin to work for everyone, we need a sea change in politics and in culture. The Pope doesn’t have a direct say on politics (although the Catholic Church is certainly a major economic actor and has its own politics) but he has a profound impact on culture. Pope John Paul II became a beloved figure among Catholics and non-Catholics alike, influencing the global debate on issues such as the compatibility of science and religion.

Pope Benedict seems to be trying to use his “bully pulpit” to shape the world economy toward compassion. I wonder if the Pope is aware of some of the good actors in the economy who have already made looking out for the common good a non-negotiable piece of their business models. Our online catalog here at EthixMerch is filled with companies--like Unionwear, Norco, Pedline, Garyline, Gill-Line, King Louie and DLX--who actively pursue the common good through basic rights on the job (health benefits, a living wage, safe conditions and collective bargaining rights) for their workers. These companies are almost uniformly small, and probably unknown to likes of Pope Benedict. But they are the ones clawing at the grassroots of our economy, planting seeds of justice while the Pope rains down much-needed words of encouragement that will reach millions.

It will be fascinating to see what changes occur as a result, both inside and outside the Church.
 

Sometimes it’s nice to stop pushing for a minute and recognize that, indeed, the “arc of the universe...bends toward justice.”

Despite (or perhaps even partially because of) the passage of California’s Prop 8 last November, much progress has been made of late in the long struggle for LGBT rights. Just this year, the number of U.S. states to legalize gay marriage jumped from two to six. And this week, President Obama announced that federal employees will be permitted to share some of their benefits with same-sex partners. (Allowing same-sex partners to share full health benefits will require legislation.)

An often-overlooked benefit of this particular civil rights movement is that it obliterates lines of class, ethnicity, race, geography and politics. While a white, heterosexual couple is probably not going to produce an African-American child, they could very well produce a gay one. Homosexuality can be a tremendously effective reminder of the diversity that defines our species. You simply can’t run away from it, so even if it makes you uncomfortable, you may as well learn tolerance and, eventually, appreciation for all kinds of people.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is a case in point of someone who probably had to overcome significant personal reservations in order to make room in his heart for his openly gay daughter. The fact that he has come out publicly in support of gay marriage speaks volumes about the potential for a widening circle of compassion.

This circle needs widening even among progressives, however, as the current struggle for gay rights is going to show. The fallout from Prop 8 created tension in California between two historically oppressed minorities – gays and African Americans – when some in the gay community publicly lashed out against African Americans, approximately 6 in 10 of whom supported Proposition 8. California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass argued that “No on 8” advocates failed to outreach in a significant way to African-American members of the LGBT community, that this oversight needlessly reminded African-Americans of the history of white racism, and that the resulting tension cost the campaign valuable momentum.

The fight for equality for same-sex couples goes on, of course, offering more opportunities for many different communities – each with their own LGBT community within it – to work together and in so doing, to create bonds that last from movement to movement.

The upcoming Pride Parade in San Francisco is one such opportunity. We were excited to get a call from a group of Jews (both LGBT and their straight allies) representing synagogues and mainstream Jewish institutions across the Bay Area, looking for sweatshop-free t-shirts that proclaim their solidarity with the LGBT marchers.

Working on this project has been extremely rewarding because of the forward progress it represents in so many different areas: recognizing our role as consumers in creating justice for workers around the world whom we may never meet; resisting complacency when the rights of others hang in the balance; and proudly adhering to one’s own cultural identity while simultaneously pushing on that culture to embrace diversity.

The parade is June 28th, so be sure to come back here to check out the photos of hundreds of Jews marching for LGBT rights, wearing sweatshop-free t-shirts. Meanwhile, here are some links to read about the “Jews March for Pride” project.

About Jews March for Pride

How to Get Involved

And here are links to the specific Jewish groups that will be standing against sweatshops while they march for LGBT rights: 

Jewish Community Relations Council

Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco

Temple Sinai of Oakland

Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco

What a great image: nurses at Parkview Community Hospital in Riverside, California, signing their first union contract and proudly wearing union made and union printed t-shirts.

Congratulations to Parkview RNs and the UNAC/UHCP on this milestone, and thanks for extending your support to union printers and garment workers.