----- Original Message ----- From: Downwithcapitalism <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2001 6:06 AM Subject: [downwithcapitalism] FW: Sweatshop report and analysis New York Times. 24 April 2001. Labor Standards Clash With Global Reality. Excerpts. Analysis at bottom. SAN SALVADOR Six years ago, Abigail Martnez earned 55 cents an hour sewing cotton tops and khaki pants. Back then, she says, workers were made to spend 18-hour days in an unventilated factory with undrinkable water. Employees who displeased the bosses were denied bathroom breaks or occasionally made to sweep outside all morning in the broiling sun. Today, she and other workers have coffee breaks and lunch on an outdoor terrace cafeteria. Bathrooms are unlocked, the factory is breezy and clean, and employees can complain to a board of independent monitors if they feel abused. The changes are the result of efforts by Gap, the big clothing chain, to improve working conditions at this independent factory, one of many that supply its clothes. Yet Ms. Martnez today earns 60 cents an hour, only 5 cents more an hour than six years ago. ... Ms. Martnez's hours are still long, production quotas are high, and her earnings are still not enough to live on. She shares a two- room concrete home with a sister, two brothers, her parents and a grandmother. Yet the real alternative in this impoverished nation is no work. And government officials won't raise the minimum wage or even enforce labor laws too rigorously for fear that employers would simply move many jobs to another poor country. The lesson from Gap's experience in El Salvador is that competing interests among factory owners, government officials, American managers and middle-class consumers all with their eyes on the lowest possible cost make it difficult to achieve even basic standards, and even harder to maintain them. ... Fed up with abusive conditions, Ms. Martnez and a small group of other workers organized and began to hold strikes at the factory, then called Mandarin International, in 1995. As tension rose, workers took over the factory and shut down power to the plant. Security guards forcibly ejected strikers; union members said the guards dragged women out by their hair and clubbed them with guns. The factory's owners fired hundreds, including Ms. Martnez. It might have ended that way, except that it occurred just as concern about sweatshops was rising in the United States. Groups like the National Labor Committee, a union-backed, workers advocacy group based in New York, had formed to oppose sweatshops. Mandarin offered a media- ready case of abuse, and the revolt was widely publicized. Still, two of the four retailers using Mandarin left after the protests J. C. Penney and Dayton Hudson (now Target). Eddie Bauer, a unit of Spiegel Inc., suspended its contract. Gap Inc., which is based in San Francisco, intended to quit, too, but a group of Mandarin workers pleaded with the company to save their jobs. ... Gap executives chose to stay after deciding that all the groups involved workers, labor activists and factory owners were willing to make changes. The workers were expected to stop disrupting the plant, and managers had to agree to more humane practices and to accept outside monitors. To make sure the changes stuck and to arbitrate disputes, Gap decided to try the then innovative idea of hiring local union, religious and academic leaders as independent monitors who would meet regularly with workers to hear complaints, investigate problems and look over the books. ... Results, however, have been negligible. The basic problem is that jobs and capital can move fast these days, as the president of El Salvador, Francisco Flores, is keenly aware. "The difficulty in this region is that there is labor that is more competitively priced than El Salvador," he said. Here, as in many other countries, labor advocates say the problem is made worse by the government's cozy ties with factory owners. When a Labor Ministry committee issued a report critical of forced overtime, poor safety and threats against labor organizers, factory owners complained. The government swiftly withdrew and disowned it. ... Before dawn each day, Flor de Mara Hernndez leaves her three children in the tent where they have lived since an earthquake leveled her home earlier this year and begins her two-hour commute to the Charter clothing factory. She and the others, like Ms. Martnez, must be at work before 7 a.m. Managers close the gate precisely on the hour and dock the pay of anyone who is late. Inside, rows of sewing machines face blackboards on which supervisors have written the daily quotas for shirts and trousers, roughly 2,000 a day for each line of 36 machines. The pace is relentless, but by local standards it is a pleasant place to work. There are lockers, tiled bathrooms, a medical clinic and an outdoor cafeteria. Large fans and high ceilings keep temperatures down. But Ms. Martnez remembers just what it took to get this far. She was among the workers who protested the abusive conditions in 1995. "Workers would bring in permission slips from their doctors to go to the hospital," she recalled, "and supervisors would rip it up in their faces." Of the 70,000 garment workers in El Salvador, 80 percent are women. Few earn enough to take care of their families. Ms. Hernndez, for example, earns about $30 a week inspecting clothes. It is not enough to feed her children; to make ends meet, she relies on help from her ex-husband. She keeps her job because the most common alternative is to work as a live-in maid or a street vendor. Jobs cutting sugar cane in the searing sun, once plentiful, are difficult to find now, and wages have fallen in recent years along with commodity prices. ... Economists estimate that 180,000 Salvadorans are jobless. Almost half of the population lives in poverty. ...[T]o get [American] contracts, El Salvador must compete with neighbors like Honduras and Nicaragua, where wages are lower and the population even poorer and more eager for work. [N.B.] Government officials and factory managers concede that El Salvador's current minimum wage is not enough to live on by some estimates it covers less than half of the basic needs of a family of four but they are wary of increasing it. "We cannot be satisfied with the wage, but we have to acknowledge the economic realities," [Labor Minister, Jorge] Nieto said. ... "We are in a very competitive marketplace," said Mr. Schrage of Gap. "Consumers make decisions on lots of factors, including price. There is no clear benefit in having invested in independent monitoring to a consumer and it is not clear if we were to make it more broad policy that consumers would get a benefit or care at all." As she shopped at the Gap flagship store at Herald Square in Manhattan, Claire Cosslett fingered an aqua cotton T-shirt made in El Salvador to check for quality. Ms. Cosslett, a legal recruiter, said she reads labels and sometimes worries that her garments are "made by some child chained to a sewing machine." American companies dread comments like that. Yet for all their fears, they ultimately have to balance their concern over image, and any feelings they have about third-world workers, with customers' attitudes. Then there are the competitive pressures to keep costs low. Would the cost of raising working standards in El Salvador raise the price of a T-shirt enough to drive off customers? Among several shoppers who were interviewed at the Manhattan store, Ms. Cosslett was the only one to say that reports of sweatshop conditions had stopped her from buying a particular brand. She said she would be willing to pay more for a garment made under better working conditions. But then she paused and hedged. "It would depend how much," she said. <>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<> This article beautifully conveys the cynical ambivalence of the privileged 1st World worker as well as effectively sketches a description of the intense exploitation intrinsic to capitalism. Good intentions thwarted by economic necessity, that's the intended mood of this piece. And, of course, at the end, the New York Times perpetuates the grand liberal canard that the consumer AS WELL AS the capitalist (mode of production) is morally obliged to make a sacrifice so 3rd World unfortunates may eat. Despite, or rather BECAUSE of, these shortcomings, the information below is useful in that it exemplifies capital's inexorable demand for collusion amongst those who would prefer to step outside the exigencies of capitalist logic to 'do the right thing': the 3rd World worker must labor against their better intentions and the 1st World worker, even the capitalists who would like to present a 'human face,' must consume against their better intentions. Morality, then, is a dead-end---as we Marxists have known for over a century now. SPAM TO FOLLOW Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
