Posted on 09/01/2003 6:10:56 AM PDT by StatesEnemy
How can you tell if the product you are about to purchase was made by a child, by teenaged girls forced to work until midnight seven days a week, or in a sweatshop by workers paid 9¢ an hour?
The sad fact is...You cannot. The companies do not want you to know, so they hide their production behind locked factory gates, barbed wire and armed guards.
Wal-Mart and the other multinationals refuse to release to the American people even the list and addresses of the factories they use around the world to make the goods we purchase. The corporations say we have no right to this information. Even the President of the United States could not find out from Wal-Mart where it manufactures its goods.
Yet, to shop with our conscience, it is our right to know in which countries and factories, under what human rights conditions and at what wages the products we purchase are made.
In the global economy, we must have the right to know: 60% of the $180 billion a year we spend on clothing, 80% of the toys and sporting goods, and 90% of the shoes we purchase are imports. We live in a global economy.
Imagine, in just the first 10 months of 1997, American companies imported one billion garments made in China--nearly four garments for every man, women and child in the U.S. Yet what do we know about who made this clothing, and under what conditions?
The companies do not want us to know that our clothing was sewn in China by young women, 17 to 25 years old (when they are fired as "too old"), forced to work seven days a week, often past midnight, for 12 to 28¢ an hour, with no benefits. Or that the women are housed in crowded, dirty dormitories, 15 to a room, and fed a thin rice gruel. That the workers are kept under 24-hour-a-day surveillance and can be fired for even discussing factory conditions. That the factories in China operate behind a veil of secrecy, behind locked metal gates, with no factory names posted and no visitors allowed. The companies do not want you to know that these women are trapped, with nowhere to turn, since China's authorities do not allow independent human rights, religious or women groups to exist, and all attempts to form independent unions have been crushed. This is the global economy.
Like other giant multinationals, Wal-Mart manufactures its private label clothing in at least 48 countries around the world, contracting production with tens of thousands of factories--including 700 to 1,000 factories in China alone. Wal-Mart's annual sales of $118 billion are larger than the gross domestic product--the entire economic output--of 155 countries in the world, and there are only a total of 192!
Wal-Mart uses its enormous power to play these countries and factories against one another, forcing them to compete over who will provide Wal-Mart the better deal, the lowest prices.
Wal-Mart then pits the American people against the desperately poor in the developing world in the race to the bottom, over who will accept the lowest wages and benefits, the most miserable living and working conditions--just to get a job.
Wal-Mart claims to have a "Buy American" policy, an "unprecedented commitment to purchase American goods," that is, until you reach the small print which reads, "...whenever pricing is comparable to goods made offshore." That is the race to the bottom in a nutshell. How can American workers compete with 9 cent-an-hour wages in Indonesia?
The truth is, Wal-Mart has moved far more production offshore than the industry average. For example, only 11% of Wal-Mart's famous Kathie Lee line of clothing is made in the U.S., while 89% is made offshore. Only 17% of Wal-Mart's men's Faded Glory clothing is made in the U.S., while 96% of its children's McKids label is made offshore. Wal-Mart has shifted the majority of its Kathie Lee production to Mexico and Indonesia--two countries where the local currencies collapsed, driving real wages through the floor, to 50¢ an hour in Mexico and 9¢ in Indonesia. It is as if Wal-Mart were chasing misery.
How the System Operates There are racks of Kathie Lee blouses for sale in Wal-Mart for $16.99. All of them are exactly alike, except for a single difference. Some are made in Mexico, where the workers are paid 50¢ an hour, while others are made in the U.S., where the workers earn $8.42 an hour. The workers in Mexico are paid just 17¢ for every $16.99 Kathie Lee blouse they sew, while the American workers earn $1.70 for the exact same work. How is it that the blouses sell for the same price? Who gains here?
In the Global Sweatshop, there are no rules In today's global economy, the multinationals are not accountable to the American people; there are no enforceable human rights or wage standards. There are no checks and balances. Corporations are free to roam the world in search of misery, high unemployment, starvation wages, no taxes, no regulations and no enforcement of labor and environmental standards.
Behind the locked factory gates, this is the reality:
Nine-to-12-year-old children in Bangladesh working past midnight sewing Wal-Mart shirts for 5¢ an hour. The children were beaten for their mistakes. (Dateline, 1992)
Thirteen-year-olds in Guatemala forced to work 13-hour shifts seven days a week sewing Wal-Mart clothing for 31¢ an hour. If they worked too slowly, these children were also beaten. (Wall Street Journal, 1995)
Wendy Diaz and 130 other 13, 14 and 15-year olds were forced to work 13-hour shifts sewing Kathie Lee pants in Honduras, earning just 25¢ for every $19.96 pair of pants they made. The girls were allowed to use the bathrooms only twice a day. (National Labor Committee, 1996)
Women in Haiti are paid 6¢ for every $19.99 "101 Dalmatians" children's outfit they sew for sale in Wal-Mart. Unable to afford milk, these women are forced to raise their children on sugar water and coffee. (NLC, 1997)
Workers in Nicaragua are locked in the factory compound from 6:45 a.m. until 7:15 p.m. with only one half-hour break for lunch, when they must race to the factory gates to purchase water and food through the barbed wire. They are paid 23¢ an hour to sew Wal-Mart clothing. (NLC/Hard Copy, 1997)
Kathie Lee handbags are made in China by women forced to work 10-hour shifts, seven days a week and earning just $3.44 for the entire 70-hour work week! The workers are stripped of their rights and kept under constant surveillance. Wal-Mart and other U.S.-based multinationals are actually lowering standards in China, slashing wages and benefits, imposing excessive overtime hours and tolerating widespread firings of anyone who dares to defend their rights. (NLC, 1998)
(Excerpt) Read more at ksworkbeat.org ...
And if the Hyper-Capitalists think we will quietly be sold out by their perversion of "free trade", and felonious profit margins, just sit back and watch what social upheaval will be wrought.
As defined by who? You, me, or Kansas wobblies?
Extracting dirt cheap labor from the poorest, and selling the product at obscene profit margins to the richest - a temporary paradigm which makes for King's Ransom of "quick bucks".
So what? Just look at the product. There's always a tag or an imprint that says where it's made. If you don't want to buy it, don't. The reason Wal-Mart - a discount retailer - has to buy foreign-made products is obvious: U.S. labor unions have made it impossible to manufacture shoes and clothing here for a reasonable price, and Wal-Mart can't sell $300 shoes or $100 jeans. Their customers don't typically shop at Saks or Barneys.
As defined by who? You, me, or Kansas wobblies?
I would say when you are paying 1 cent in labor costs for the production of child's sweatshirt you plan to sell for $19.99 (it's actually less then 1 cent in many of these piecework monitored 'shops')- that that is a start towards a working definition.
Why should Walmart, cowtow to people like you who bitch and moan about stuff like this instead of getting off your lazy hippi ass and go change their system of government so people don't have to live like what you've described.
You should be thanking Walmart for their innovativeness and low prices!
We will all be waiting for the "social upheaval" while listening to our mobile Walmart CD players with the CD's we buy at Walmart.
Don't worry, soon the free traitors will jump on your post and tell you that American workers will have to compete with workers overseas if they want jobs.
They never say what that means but this story spells it out clearly enough. As soon as Americans are willing to work for 9 cents an hour under slave labor conditions, where will be plenty of new jobs created here in the USA!
Want to guess?
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