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 without imported goods, that same "warrior" couldn't afford anything.
We need to think leaner. If you want a job, be willing to work for 8 cents an hour. If it's good enough for the Chinese, it's good enough for us!
Again, you (not Webster's) are doing the defining, and "felonious" is (or should be) a pretty carefully used word. I don't dig Wal-Mart myself, and while I find the corporation to be problematic on a number of levels, I think "felonious" is more agitprop than adjective when used in regard to overseas labor.
Extracting dirt cheap labor from the poorest, and selling the product at obscene profit margins to the richest,
I'm sorry, but this kind of language strikes me as being too similar to populist/communist street rhetoric for comfort. Regardless of our disagreement, I still intend to stay away from Wally.
But only because:
a. I believe in small business
b. I'm a tremendous social snob despite my limited means.
I wonder how the "Free Traders" would feel if our defense industry left for lower wages in Communist China?
With this in mind, its interesting that the author chose Wal-Mart as the subject of his anger. At least at Wal-Mart, you can buy $30 shoes made in the so-called "sweat shops" rather than forking over $150 for a pair of similarly made shoes endorsed by some big-name NBA star. Silly consumers sometimes.
I wonder why that is?
I don't really like buying stuff made in Communist China, but if the alternative would be spending 1,000% for clothes, then I'll do it.
WAL-MART can be pretty funny, though- one Christmas I was in one in Anchorage with my wife, and they had a giant U.S. Flag hanging in the store- but EVERY SINGLE ITEM she bought (mostly Christmas decorations and toys) was "MADE IN CHINA".
By the way, the quality is generally good.
I wonder why that is?
Perhaps its a slow day at DU???
What a great point- you have really nailed this.
Buying and Selling prices are based on what the market will bear. Its basic supply and demand. You need a course in economics.
That's an irony that usually comes up in these discussions. Some people think it's there right to buy whatever product they want, and call you a communist if you disagree with their buying goods made in communist/third world sweatshops.
So you don't care about blue-collar workers, what about college educated class-snobs having their jobs sent to India or taken by visa / indentured servants right here in America? The "little man's" job was only the first, your job is next suckers!
You people kill me. You are right out of a Charles Dickens novel!
"Let the poor die then and decrease the surplus population!"
Jeez, how did we get to the point that Americans could see their fellow citizens thrown out of work and not give a tinkers damn about it and still call ourselves "patriots"??? What a joke. The elite that still have jobs will pay for all the other Americans that are thrown out of work with ever increasing amounts of taxes and fees and the societal costs of millions of unemployed people with no hope of a better life.
Maybe the vast majority of people living in a democracy are willing to sit back and do nothing while their way of life and standard of living is systematically destroyed by the politicians they elect? Sure, that will happen...for a while.
But isn't that part of the point? We are told that Nike can't afford to have workers in any place other than China and Vietnam. They then pay Lebron James $90 million. Well, it is just a business priority then. If he sells 9 million pairs, they have to give him $10 per pair of shoes sold. If they cut the cost of these endorsements in half, say made it $45 million, and hired american, they could still make the same profit. Seriously. If that $5 per pair of shoes went to an american worker's salary. Does anybody believe an american worker couldn't produce enough pair of shoes per hour to pay for $5 per pair? My guess is that the american worker could at least produce 4 pairs of shoes an hour for a salary of $8.50. If ya add health care, overhead, etc... it would still be under $20.
But instead, these shoe companies are competing for the next big celebrity instead and turning celebrity endorsements into the old dutch tulip market.
18 year old kids who haven't taken a single NBA shot, are worth more than the president of the United States.
If the guy making a buck more per hour can't afford to pay an extra dime for a bag of fries, he can't afford to buy the fries now, either.
In 1965, CEOs in the U.S. took home 20 times the pay of the average worker. By 1990, this ratio has risen to 96. By 1995, the ratio had become 160. And in 2000, CEOs took home compensation that was 458 times the pay of the average worker. The level of CEO compensation in 2000 was 1223 times the pay of minimum wage workers (Sklar et al. 2001). Between 1990 and 1998, wages for average workers rose at the rate of inflation or at single-digit rates; pay for CEOs at major U.S. corporations rose 481 percent (Phillips 2002). By the late 1990s, U.S. CEOs were earning, on average, more than twice as much as CEOs in other advanced economies (Mishel et al. 1999). Over the past three decades, pay for U.S. workers has been stagnant not only in comparison to CEO compensation, but also in comparison to business profits. From 1968 to 2000, the real value of the minimum wage dropped 35% and the real value of average wages dropped by 2.6%. By contrast corporate profits during this period rose 64.4% and retail profits rose 158.3%. If the minimum wage had kept pace with overall domestic profits during this 32-year span, it would have been $13.02 in 2000. Instead, it was $5.15 (Sklar et al. 2001).
Even the "CIA World Factbook" notes that since the 70s, gains have gone to the top 20% while wages for the remaining 80% have been stagnate.
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