At the factories I visited abroad, the average working age was around 20. At the factory in NY, it was probably in the late 40’s. In developing countries you are pretty much washed up as a garment worker when you reach the not-so ripe ol’ age of 25.
The average garment worker I met in Asia makes my clothes for somewhere around $60/month, or $720/year. Let’s say I make $30,000/year (not counting my stipend from my sugar momma wife). Their annual income is 2.4% of mine. Crazy, huh? I’m rich!
Now let’s move to the factory in Perry, NY, I visited that makes jerseys for the NBA. Let’s say that the workers making the uniforms make $30,000/year just like me. While at the factory, I saw Jason Kidd’s name being stitched on his uniform. Kidd makes $17.2 million/year. The workers that make his jersey earn about .14% of his annual salary.
I’m not sure that these comparisons are immediately useful to my purposes here. But what it makes me think is…
Damn! Those NBA dudes are loaded.
I live at a level of comfort that the workers in Asia can’t imagine. Jason Kidd lives at a comfort-level that I can’t imagine.
I’m not sure if I can fully appreciate how good I’ve got it; there’s no way Jason Kidd can.
If only I could rock cultural arenas like my buddy Dalton.
Yep, he’s not afraid to self-promote.
Ain’t she gorgeous?
And what better time would there to be to share this reading that Annie and I wrote, which was read by a friend during the wedding? None. Here you go…
10 years ago…
Bill Clinton is starting his second term.
In Roslin, Scotland, scientists announce they cloned a sheep. Her name is Dolly.
Chicago Bulls win their 5th championship. Michael Jordan is still awesome.
There is no Google.
The world is introduced to an 11-year-old magician in training named Harry Potter.
Titanic rocks the box office.
I walk Annie across the “Old Gym” floor during lunch to ask Kelsey if he’s going to the homecoming dance. I still take credit for hooking them up.
Annie tells Kelsey to pick her up at her house to go to the game. Kelsey asks why she just can’t walk since she lives so close to the school.
He has a lot to learn. He’s lucky she’s patient.Over the next 10 years their relationship beats the odds. Miles are traveled between Wilmington and Miami, phone calls are made from Thailand. Kelsey teaches SCUBA in Key West while Annie trains dolphins in Cleveland.
They’ve been separated by states and countries, oceans and continents and still Kelsey and Annie remain Kelsey and Annie. He says that she’s like a fungus and just kind of grows on you.
On a chilly weekend in December, standing on a wooded-ridge in southern Indiana known as Hesitation Point, Kelsey asked Annie to marry him. After 10 years, Annie was still surprised. She managed to stop laughing long enough to say yes.
Where’s your banana from?
If it’s from Colombia it might have a bit of blood on it.
Banana producer Chiquita will pay a $25 million fine and serve five years’ probation for once paying millions of dollars to groups in Colombia considered by the U.S. to be terrorist organizations, a Department of Justice spokesman said Tuesday.
Colombia ain’t Ohio. If you are going to do business there, you are going to have to get your hands dirty. I’m not for hiring soldiers of fortune, unless they are these soldiers of fortune, but to me it seems as if our government isn’t entirely above the practice either.
I like bananas in my smoothie, on my cereal, split and topped with ice cream, and just plain peel and eat. I’m not thrilled that some of my banana spending is lining the pockets of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia. But that’s not going to keep me from eating them.
I’m tempted to take my banana business elsewhere, although I’m not sure there are any other options, but when I start thinking about the ethics of the situation I’m not sure what to do. (Note: I don’t know jack about the banana business and specifically that of Colombia and I’m not going to spend my morning researching it because…well…I should actually try and get some work done.) If I stop buying bananas produced in Colombia how many people will lose their jobs? How many of these people will turn to Colombia’s most well-known crop?
And I’m sure there are many other questions like: What about the monkeys? What about cartoons that employ banana peels as gag props? Will future cartoons be forced to slip on orange peels? That doesn’t sound very funny.
One thing my WAIW? quest has taught me is there is no black and white, good and bad solution to such dilemmas. The world is much more complex than:
eating + bananas = bad
“ACO Welcomes Kelsey and Annie Timmerman”
The sign is weird. It’s the first time we’ve seen Annie’s new name.
We’re greeted by a reporter from the local newspaper. Lorraine is excited that we came all the way to Perry, New York, to see where my shorts were made. She doesn’t act like this is a weird thing to be doing at all. She thinks it’s neat. I like Lorraine.
Lorraine describes Perry as such: “I always tell people that the south side of town smells like cookies and the north like manure.”
The cookie smell comes from the Archway factory and the manure smell comes from the surrounding dairy farms. Archway cookies remind me of visiting my grandma Timmerman. I’m not sure if the woman ever baked a single cookie in her life, but she always had a pack of unopened Archway oatmeal cookies and a can of Hawaiian punch at the ready for snack time. The manure reminds me of playing basketball in my buddy Adam’s barn. At times the ball would roll out of the hay mow down to where the cows were. We took turns retrieving the ball. You were unlucky if it landed on a pattie when it was your turn.
Both of us born and raised in rural Ohio, Annie and I can relate to life in Perry. The people are the kind of nice that city slickers don’t know – small-town nice. But like many small towns, Perry has lost jobs to conglomerations, cut backs, and cheaper labor overseas. Champion, who made my shorts, once employed over 850 people in Perry. In 2002, they up and left, a major blow to the town of 7,000.
ACO was born from the ashes of Champion. The company founded by Sam who owns the furniture store on Main Street, started with eleven people working in the factory Champion abandoned. The eleven employees worked in a small lighted corner, leaving tens of thousands of square-feet in darkness.
When Ed the CEO lost his battle with cancer, their future was uncertain. They called Mark, a former Champion manager, who had moved south with the industry.
“That thing about not being able to go home again isn’t true,” Marks tells me. “When I came to visit for the day and saw the same people I worked with in the same office I had worked in…that’s what did it for me. I came back for the people. Definitely, not the weather.”
A year ago ACO employed 30 people. Today, after landing a big contract with Adidas who owns Reebok, ACO has 120 employees and looking for more. They custom make uniforms for half of the NBA teams, 3 NFL teams, and over 70 colleges. During our tour we see a lady sewing Jason Kidd’s name onto his Jersey.
The factory isn’t that different from the factories I’ve seen all over the world, but the work environment is. Employees listen to iPods, they have family photos at their workstations, and they smile at us. This is the biggest difference. At the factories in Asia, I tried not to look at the workers for fear that my tour guide would question my interest in their products and cut the tour short. In Perry, Mark greets each employee by name. In Perry, each employee seems to be an individual piece of something that’s growing, something that’s exciting. In Asia, each worker is a set of hands.
Donna, Maxine, Sue, and many of the other workers at ACO remember my 1992 Dream Team shorts. They tell me about how they were made and what their part in making them was. Many of the employees at ACO worked for Champion. Some of them have 20 to 30 years of experience making apparel, and a few over 40 years.
New sewers start out at $8.50/hour. They make more in one hour than many of the workers I met abroad make in a week.
Lorraine leaves us as we chat with Mark in his office. She has other stories to cover. Apparently a cow gave birth to triplets and a local girl won Grand Champion at the fair. It’s good to know that there are bigger stories in Wyoming County, New York, than newlyweds visiting a factory.
A big thanks to the kind people of Perry. I look forward to writing about their town and ACO. It should be a nice upbeat last chapter, a great way to wrap up my quest, and hopefully, a great way to end a book.
“Unless the context otherwise indicates, words importing the singular number shall include the plural number and words importing the singular number shall include the singular number.”
I read this today while reviewing a contract at my 3-day a week Day Job. After which I poked out my eye with a knife. And of course, in this case the singular use of “eye” means both eyes and the singular use of “knife” means one knife.
Like other things, too much legalese will make you go blind.
I’ve always liked not having been to Canada. It gave me a comeback to people who refer to me as a world traveler and say things like, “Where haven’t you been?”
“Well, I’ve never been to Canada.” I’d say.
Everybody knows that you ain’t no world traveler unless you’ve been to Canada. The response would shut them up pretty fast. But here I am in Niagara Falls, Canada. Crap.
Annie and I haven’t been more than from miles from the US border so really that shouldn’t count as having been to a country, especially a country the size of Canada. Maybe, if we were 5 miles into Luxembourg, it would be a different story.
So, officially I’ve still never been to Canada. Unofficially, I have been. And I quite like how the cars stop for pedestrians in the crosswalks.
“Do things, not think things.”
Visit the humor writers website for more Dave on writing.
In the interest of full disclosure, Dave and I are pals. Okay, maybe not pals, but I did wait in line to meet him at the Erma Bombeck Conference in Dayton. See…
Registration is now open for the conference in April of 2008. Last year it sold out in 12 days. If you are interested in going, better sign up now.
hi@kelseytimmerman.com 
Digg
Facebook
Flickr
LinkedIn
StumbleUpon
Twitter
