Nightmare on Sesame Street

K’Nex, makers of Lincoln Logs, are in the cross heirs of the National Labor Committee for the poor conditions under which a Sesame Street play set is produced. The play set in questions is Ernie’s Building Set.

From the story in the New York Daily News:

“Every single labor law in China was being violated at this factory,” said Charles Kernaghan, director of the committee.
The report says that 600 workers - including 100 16-year-olds and some children as young as 13 - are forced to work seven days a week, up to 15 hours a day, often going for months without a day off.

The workers are allegedly paid 43 cents an hour and sometimes forced to work 23.5 hour shifts.

The Ernie Building Set in question retails for $10.99.

In the interest of full disclosure: Ernie is my favorite Sesame Street character. I never cared much for Bert.

In defense of Sweatshops

Benjamin Powell, Assistant Professor of Economics at Suffolk University, is coming to the defense of sweatshops. In this article he makes several arguments:

- we need to look at jobs in the garment industry in the context of their countries’ economies
- Fighting for workers’ rights alone will lead to the unemployment of workers
- Workers’ rights can only improve if worker efficiency and productivity improves

Here’s an excerpt:

Should Kathy Lee have cried? Her Honduran workers earned 31 cents per day. At 10 hours per day, which is not uncommon in a sweatshop, a worker would earn $3.10. Yet nearly a quarter of Hondurans earn less than $1 per day and nearly half earn less than $2 per day.
Wendy Diaz’s message should have been, “Don’t cry for me, Kathy Lee. Cry for the Hondurans not fortunate enough to work for you.” Instead the U.S. media compared $3.10 per day to U.S. alternatives, not Honduran alternatives. But U.S. alternatives are irrelevant. No one is offering these workers green cards.

This graph shows that most apparel workers earn more than the average person in their country.

I agree that in most of these countries there are much worse ways of trying to make a living, but I’m not so sure about his numbers. Not that I know what the numbers should be, but that’s my point, no one can. He even admits to his assumption:

Data on actual hours worked were not available. Therefore, we provided earnings estimates based on various numbers of hours worked. Since one characteristic of sweatshops is long working hours, we believe the estimates based on 70 hours pr week are the most accurate.

I met workers that worked much longer than 70 hours per week, but didn’t get paid for more than 50. Numbers, like Chinese labor laws, are often pointless. Unless you do extensive worker interviews and studies, I don’t think there is anyway to obtain accurate estimation of wages paid or hours worked in most garment sectors

I’m not a big fan of the way he dismisses the passion of the anti-sweatshop movement. He talks like Charles Kernaghan, arguably the father of the modern movement, is a puppet of US protectionism. As if, Kernaghan’s fight for the workers around the world is a charade for his actual intention of preserving what’s left of the American apparel industry.

Powell’s essential argument is sweatshops are good. The anti-sweatshop movement’s argument is that sweatshops are bad.

In my opinion they’re both wrong.

It’s Sunday, what better day is there to ask What Would Jesus Buy?

Joshua Berman recommended this movie to me. I’ll watch it soon and report back. Looks hilarious.

Happy Cows More Expensive to Eat

Annie and I rode our bikes to Scotty’s Brewhouse yesterday. Scotty has a build-your-own-burger option where you can select the type of cheese, condiments, bun, and meat. For $6.75 you can order the groundchuck. For $9.75 you can order meat from grass-fed, free range, happy cows described as such:

half pound grass-fed, $9.75
usa born and raised product. strict animal welfare and animal care protocols. never confined to a feedlot. rather, they are in a “free range environment.” produced without the use of feed grade antibiotics, synthetic growth hormones, or animal byproducts. have never been fed corn or other grain at any time in their lives. packaged at plants that have a documented record in animal welfare, food safety and sanitation. higher in omega 3, CLA, vitamin e and other antioxidants when compared with grain fed beef.

I find this to be an interesting ethical decision. Is it worth paying $3 or 144% more for a clearer conscience? If not for a cow, how about a Fair Trade, ethically produced T-shirt?

American Apparel, a different kind of brand and a pantless CEO

I mentioned AA in the previous post and I write about them briefly in the book. I stumbled upon an excerpt from Rob Walkers soon-to-be-released book Buying In that features a profile of the company. Here’s some excerpts from the excerpt:

…At a moment when practically every clothes maker was offshoring to cut costs, American Apparel made its wares at a U.S. factory in which the average industrial worker (usually a Latino immigrant) was paid between $12 and $13 an hour and got medical benefits. The company had taken out ads in little arty magazines, noting that it was “sweatshop free.”…

…Another self-consciously ethical clothing brand, the union-friendly SweatX, had just gone out of business. The lesson of SweatX, Charney said, was that building a brand solely around a company’s ethical practices was not a good strategy for reaching masses of consumers…

…”That’s the problem with the anti-sweatshop movement. You’re not going to get customers walking into stores by asking for mercy and gratitude.” If you want to sell something, ethical or otherwise, he said, snapping the book closed, “appeal to people’s self-interest.”…

…The conversation paused when two designers working on men’s underwear appeared. They had just come from the factory floor, carrying several pairs of underwear that had been manufactured about 10 minutes earlier. Charney said they’d already gone through about 30 prototypes. “Imagine if we were outsourcing through China!”

He checked with me, then took off his pants and underwear and started trying on the samples. “I need a thin Sharpie,” he said, taking off one pair and putting on another. He wrote on the removed pair: Good but tighter. There was a great deal of chatter about the legs and the waist, about taking in a half-inch, about the fact that the factory shift was going to end soon. “This is a great pair that I have on right now,” Charney suddenly announced…

…It’s not that he cares less about treating his workers ethically, Charney insisted; it’s that he doesn’t think trumpeting work conditions will help him compete. Sure, he hoped quality or social consciousness or a distaste for logos would each attract some consumers. But he also hoped that selling a sexed-up version of youth culture to young people would attract others, and hopefully in greater numbers. If ethics draws in some consumers, great. But for others who respond to different rationales, he’ll provide those, too…

Walker’s book is released June 3rd. I wish it would have been out sooner because it looks like just the type of book I would have read to help me form ideas to write mine. I’ll still give it a read.

You can read a few chapters of Buying In.

LA Garment manufacturers fail to comply with labor laws

The Made in USA label doesn’t always mean made under fair and legal labor conditions.

From Occupational Safety and Health Online:

The Labor and Workforce Development Agency announced that Economic Employment Enforcement Coalition (EEEC) investigators issued 42 citations for labor law violations with fines totaling $457,000 in a recent sweep of 22 garment manufacturers in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The coalition said its enforcement actions uncovered serious violations in the industry that included failure to register, pay the minimum wage, maintain worker’s comp insurance, pay overtime, provide itemized deductions to employees, and keep records and post labor notices as mandated by law. In addition, clothing was confiscated at six locations.

“Many of these garment manufacturers failed to comply with the law as we found multiple labor law violations at many locations,” said EEEC Director David Dorame. “Their illegal actions cannot be allowed to continue. By targeting enforcement against these illegal operators, we help level the playing field for law abiding businesses.”

I first learned about the industry in LA at the 2006 Sweat-Free conference in Minnesota. Making below minimum wage in LA is a level of poverty not so different from being paid $50 per month in Cambodia. An economist should compare the two.

The garments may not be exported, but the people who make them are often imported from China, Vietnam, Mexico, etc. Which is better, shipping products around the world or people?

Not all factories in LA are guilty of cutting corners. American Apparel, the largest US-based garment manufacturer, is widely praised for its good pay and benefits, so much in fact, that there is a year long waiting list to get a manufacturing job there.

Michael Pollan’s call to Action: “Plant a garden!”

Author Michael Pollan (In defense of Food, The Omnivores Dilemma) recently wrote a call to action in the New York Times Magazine, including this little mid-paragraph nugget:

Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.

Mainly, he’s talking about the environment, but his message can be applied universally. As I read, I found myself substituting “clothes” for “food”, and “what we wear” for “what we eat”.

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle — of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Blood, Sweat, and T-shirts

When I was in Cambodia and China I heard rumblings about a BBC reality show/documentary that followed young Brits as they worked in a sweatshop in India. The first episode of Blood, Sweat, and T-shirts aired last week.

“I don’t understand. Why don’t you just go to night school.”

“There’s like Poo on the floor” in the slums of Mumbai

Cotton: A fashion revelation or “I ain’t carrying that!” or “Do I look like an ork to you!”

For more of Blood, Sweat, and T-shirts GO HERE.

Radiohead “All I need”

As part of MTV’s EXIT campaign to end exploitation and trafficking Radiohead has released a powerful new video.

Not that lead singers are any more qualified to talk about human rights and globalization than, say, drummers or butchers, but here’s what Radiohead’s lead singer Thom Yorke has to say on the subjects:

“(It’s) a video of two parallel stories running, one of a little boy in the West and one of a little boy in a sweatshop in the East, and the boy [in the West] ends up buying the shoes from the sweatshop. It’s actually quite powerful. It’s the sort of images I have in my head anyway. Sometimes when you’re walking down High Street and you’re looking at the incredibly cheap [sneakers], you sort of think, ‘Hmmm, well how did they manage to make that so cheaply?’ It sort of reminds me of one of my preoccupations, so I’m touched that the music goes with that. I think it’s great.”

“…if you are in the West, it’s a luxury to be able to talk about the importance of human rights for everybody, but yet in the East, or the poorer countries where slave labor is going on, if you talk to certain companies, it seems that it’s much more important that they’re on some sort of economic ladder, and somehow the rights of the workers are secondary to economic growth. And that I find a very peculiar logic, and I think that’s as much about the power of the companies and the profits they’re making as it is of any moral stance. So it would be useful when the West talks about human rights, they actually consider countries where, for a lot of workers, it’s not really on the agenda yet.”

Here’s the video:

Confessions of a sweatshop inspector

The Washington Monthly has a great piece by editor and former social compliance inspector, T.A. Frank, titled Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector (first seen on CloneSix). Frank covers a lot of the issues surrounding international sourcing. Here’s a few excerpts:

On the job…

Unfortunately, we missed stuff. All inspections do. And sometimes it was embarrassing. At one follow-up inspection of a factory in Bangkok at which I’d noted some serious but common wage violations, the auditors who followed me found pregnant employees hiding on the roof and Burmese import workers earning criminally low wages. Whoops.

On ignorance is bliss sourcing…

Now, anyone in the business knows that when inspections uncover safety violations or wage underpayment more than once or twice—let alone five times—it’s a sign that bigger problems are lurking beneath. Companies rarely get bamboozled about this sort of thing unless they want to.

And many prefer to be bamboozled, because it’s cheaper.

On WalMart…

I noticed that Wal-Mart claimed to require factories to maintain decent labor standards—but why did it seem to think it could find them among the lowest bidders?

On being an engaged consumer…

Now, I know about good and bad actors mostly because I saw them directly. But ordinary consumers searching on company Web sites—Walmart.com, Nike.com, etc.—can find out almost everything they need to know just sitting at their desks. For instance, just now I learned from Wal-Mart’s latest report on sourcing that only 26 percent of its audits are unannounced. By contrast, of the inspections Target conducts, 100 percent are unannounced. That’s a revealing difference. And companies that do what Nike does—prescreen, build long-term relationships, disclose producers—make a point of emphasizing that fact, and are relatively transparent. Companies that don’t are more guarded. (When in doubt, doubt.)

On child labor…

You may rightly hate the idea of child labor, but firing a fourteen-year-old in Indonesia from a factory job because she is fourteen does nothing but deprive her of income she is understandably desperate to keep. (She’ll find worse work elsewhere, most likely, or simply go hungry.)

On the Challenge…

But when a Chinese factory saves money by making its employees breathe hazardous fumes and, by doing so, closes down a U.S. factory that spends money on proper ventilation and masks, that’s wrong. It’s wrong by any measure. And that’s what we can do something about if we try. It’s the challenge we face as the walls come down, the dolls, pajamas, and televisions come in, and, increasingly, the future of our workers here is tied to that of workers who are oceans away.