Teamsters and Turtles

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.

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.

“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.

If you’ve ever driven eighty on the highway, fudged a bit on your tax returns, or created a mixed CD for a friend, then you’ve learned a valuable lesson about democracy in the United States of America: sometimes the law doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Without enforcement, laws are just a paper tiger. And as it happens, our country has neither the will nor the resources to enforce every law.

We won’t stand for having Big Brother watching our every move, so we tolerate lawbreaking quite frequently. Sometimes, of course, this tolerated lawbreaking means we are just using common sense. For example, it might make sense for a highway patrol officer to look the other way when you’re driving eighty, if she knows full well that two minutes later she’s bound to run into some maniac going ninety, who poses a much greater risk to the public safety. This, however, doesn’t negate the fact that your butt is breaking the law.

But sometimes lawbreaking is tolerated for less justifiable reasons, the most common of which is probably “Enforcing this law is hard!”

This is what’s happening with sweatshop-free procurement ordinances around the country. Certain municipalities (including Los Angeles and San Francisco) have taken it upon themselves to ban sweatshop-made goods in government purchasing. Since those ordinances were passed, however, enforcement has been sparse to non-existent. City uniforms are as sweaty as ever.

And, to be quite fair, enforcing this law is hard. Very hard…especially when you consider the intense pressure put on city officials and administrators to protect the public purse by awarding contracts – for things like uniforms for police officers -- to the lowest bidder. Even when vendors are shown by independent monitoring groups to be in non-compliance, it is difficult to take corrective action because of the relatively small leverage any one city has with the large corporations that supply their uniforms.

Cities that have passed sweatfree ordinances should be applauded for taking a step in the right direction. It is a step that’s always preceded by months or years of dedicated community activism, and it represent a crucial first step by at least declaring the “will” to begin to right the terrible wrongs being done to workers around the world.

But unless eventually followed up with enforcement, the original action starts to lose its meaning. Fortunately, there are superheroes out there who have been following this game all along, and who have come up with a plan to allow cities to enforce sweatshop prevention laws. The Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) and Sweatfree Communities think that by pooling the buying power of cities, states and universities, they can create a network of certified “sweatshop-free” producers who are provided with the carrots and sticks needed to ensure that corporations, subcontractors, the consumer, AND the workers can ALL benefit from a contract.

The WRC is partnering with local sweatshop activists from coast to coast to convince their states and cities to join this network, which they are calling the Sweatfree Consortium. As odd as it may seem, governments are the underdogs here in working to get their own laws enforced. But banding together - like all good underdogs do - may give them the leverage to demand enforcement from the contractors.

It’s also important to note that there are Union factories right here in the United States that are fully capable of producing uniforms for use in our cities, and these factories need to be a part of the solution as well. As the current economic crisis has demonstrated, we need to keep our own house in order (which means protecting and strengthening middle class jobs) in order to avoid catastrophe.

If you are affiliated with a state, county, or municipality interested in having uniforms or other printed merchandise made right here by middle class workers, please contact us.
 

Have you ever suddenly forgotten something that you’ve known for years or even decades? Like the words to The Star Spangled Banner or the name of an old friend?

Sometimes we forget things that are second nature to us. We take them for granted for so long that one day they simply float out of our consciousness and fall onto the floor without making a sound.

This phenomenon doesn’t only happen with names and song lyrics. It can happen with our most cherished values. If we don’t think about them and re-examine them from time to time, we can forget the reasons why those values are a part of us. And that leaves us wide open to complacency and makes us vulnerable to clever arguments from those whose values are in fact contradictory to our own.

The problem of sweatshops offers a perfect example. There’s always been a somewhat tempting argument out there that we needn’t worry about sweatshops because they are a “natural” and temporary step in the lifecycle of developing nations. The proof of this, the argument goes, is that they are better than the alternative, otherwise people wouldn’t take the jobs.

The appeasement of injustice inherent in this argument is easily seen through when the argument is spoken by people who view success in the free market as a moral good. But a similar argument has also come from more compassionate voices, notably in a recent op-ed in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristof.

This piece generated substantial buzz. If you google the term "sweatshops," it now comes up as the sixteenth entry. (Thus, support for sweatshops from the left is now a standing part of the international dialog on this issue.) And—judging by the echoes and plaudits that it received around the web—the piece caused a great deal of second-guessing among progressives about whether or not we need to keep fighting to eradicate sweatshops.

As the popularity of Kristof’s article shows, the anti-sweatshop movement can’t afford to assume that rational people who are proponants of justice have fully internalized the reasons to oppose sweatshops. So, for those who find Kristof’s argument appealing, allow me to offer the following counter point.

Kristof claims that working in a sweatshop is “a cherished dream” for many people in the developing world. This may be the case, but dreams don’t always turn out so well when they come true. Just ask the thousands of young Chinese girls who are sent by their families to work in big-city factories only to become indentured servants without the funds to return home to the countryside, even if they wanted to.

And even in those cases where sweatshop labor is an improvement, how does that excuse us from inaction when so many workers are subjected to forced overtime, criminally low wages, unsafe conditions, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment; all while the executives of the clothing giants who order from these factories are living high on the hog?

The main problem with Kristof’s argument is that he seems to assume that the goal of the anti-sweatshop movement is to shut down factories where sweatshop abuses take place. In fact, it is understood within the movement that shutting down a factory in the face of a campaign by workers to better their condition is in and of itself a sweatshop condition. Sweatshop activists don’t want workers to lose their jobs. We’re saying that those jobs should be dignified ones in which workers earn something approaching their fair share of the profits of their labor.

Some factory workers may indeed prefer sweatshops over the alternatives Kristof presents, which include trying to scratch a living out of the garbage dumps in Phnom Penh. However, most still reside in abject poverty without meaningful hope for upward movement. One of the main goals of the anti-sweatshop movement is to help create a global middle class of blue collar workers. Wherever the movement succeeds, greater democracy and a thriving civil society are likely to follow. And this, as much as direct aid or anything else that sweatshop apologists might propose to do, will help that family living in a garbage dump in Phnom Penh, dreaming of sweatshops.

UPDATE: Here's a link to a diary at Talking Points Memo with more discussion on this same topic.

It’s not hard to understand why the sweatshop issue gets a lot of attention in the United States. The tragic stories of abused, chronically-poor factory workers make headlines because the garments they produce are bought by name brand corporations and then sold to almost all of us. It makes people uncomfortable and frustrated to be implicated in a system that enriches corporate executives yet keeps factory workers around the world in a state of perpetual, abject poverty.

It’s also not hard to understand why, despite all the attention, solutions to sweatshops have been so difficult to develop and enforce. Simply put, the garment industry has been fully globalized, but international labor laws are effectively non-existent. And as we have learned from the current economic meltdown, the absence of regulation is a recipe for disaster for those on the bottom of the economic ladder.

It is crucially important for consumers to understand that creative solutions are out there, but that they need people to believe in them and support them.

For that reason, Ethix Ventures, Unionwear, Sweatfree Communities and a delegation of garment workers from Hondurus and Purerto Rico attended the National Association of State Procurement Officers this week.

We were there to promote the Sweatfree Consortium, one of the most innovative and comprehensive solutions to ever come out of the anti-sweatshop movement. And the effort is gaining steam. Basically, the consortium makes an end-run around the absence of international labor laws by pooling together the buying power of consumers who care enough to demand basic rights for the men, women, and children in the factories. These consumers can direct their purchasing to specific factories that voluntarily agree to legitimate enforcement mechanisms to protect against child labor, forced labor, sexual harassment, intimidation, verbal abuse and all of the harsh realities of sweatshops.

So who are these benevolent consumers? They are cities and states around the country, and more are joining the effort all the time. These government entities – backed and encouraged by active citizens – are standing up to guarantee that government uniforms for contracted and subcontracted employees will be made ethically, according to the standards of decency that we would demand in our own workplaces.

Ethix Ventures was so proud to be involved in the direct appeal by workers and organizers to state procurement officers from around the nation. We believe that 2009 will see massive growth in this program, and we plan to be there to support the process with our bodies and our dollars, learn about government procurement, and offer our skills and services to help clean up the public sector.

It is all the more exciting to know that if this effort is successful, it can spread to other large groups of purchasers (USAS and WRC are heavily engaged in this process at the university and college level), gradually reducing the proliferation of sweatshops until that wonderful day when the international community gets its act together and enforces human rights in the workplace.

In all the uproar about AIG bonuses in the recent news, it was easy to miss the official swearing in of Hilda Solis, our new Secretary of Labor. 

The secretary was sworn in by swearer-inner-in-chief, Vice President Joe Biden. In this otherwise ceremonial occasion, there was a glimmer of substance for those of us who care deeply about worker abuse and exploitation in the garment industry, here and abroad.

Take a minute to read the transcript and see if you can pick out what was notable about the VP's remarks.

The big news? Vice President Biden actually used the term "sweatshop." It was a somewhat passing reference to Hilda Solis's background as a champion for worker rights, but it did not go unnoticed here. While EFCA has been officially introduced -- and the president looks to be gearing up to fight on its behalf -- the U.S. garment industry is notoriously difficult to unionize and is unlikely to be considered "low-hanging fruit" for the union movement. 

When and if EFCA passes, does the administration intend to let union organizers wage war against sweatshops alone, or will Obama/Biden work to give Ms. Solis the tools and the cover to enforce wage, hour and safety violations that are still commonplace in this country? 

At this point it is anybody's guess, although I am inclined to believe that the president's agenda will not always be geared toward the middle class, but also toward the expansion of the middle class.

However, at the moment, the administration has its hands full, so we look for small hints of an impending full-scale war on sweatshops. I couldn't find the word anywhere on whitehouse.gov, but it was nice to hear it spoken by the Vice President.