Sweatshop-Free Obama Onesie

Yes, it really exists.

NorthFace, CAFTA, and Eddie Bauer under attack

The headline of the National Labor Committee’s Press Release:

Salvadoran Women Sewing $165 Jackets for The North Face and $54 Shirts for Eddie Bauer Cannot Afford Milk for their Children

The jacket in question is NorthFace’s uber-popular Denali jacket. I own one. Here’s me modeling next to my friend Sange in Nepal…

The NLC is calling for a 50% wage increase that would allow “The workers and their families (to climb) out of misery and at least into poverty.” Companies in Central America and Mexico are already having trouble competing with their Asian counterparts. It would be great if they could increase the worker’s wage and still compete, but it’s not likely. I’m guessing the end of the industry in El Salvador is nearing. Rumor is that the industry might jump to Bangladesh where instead of paying workers 94-cents an hour the workers get paid about that much in a day.

Related Post: My NorthFace shorts

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.

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.

Clinton funded by Saipan garment Tycoon

The story is a little dated, but I just saw it here.

I first read about Willie Tan in Nobodies by John Bowe. Tan owned the majority of garment factories on Saipan, which were almost entirely supported by importing workers from China, Bangladesh, etc. In 2006, he and his family donated $8,000 to the Clinton campaign. Some are calling for Hillary to give it back and refute his support.

Sweatshop the Game

Does anyone remember the computer game Hot Dog stand in which you buy the hotdog, the buns, etc, and you see if you can make your little hot dog business work?

Well Sim-Sweatshop is kinda like that except instead of selling hot dogs for a profit you make shoes for a loss. Okay, other than they are both less than elementary introductions to economics, they’re nothing alike.

The goal of Sim-Sweatshop is to make three shoes in a day to earn your full day’s worth of pay – $6.05. You do this by dragging the parts of a shoe together. It’s frustrating, which I suppose is the point, because the game constantly interrupts you to eat or join a union or to buy your daughter some shoes. The closest I got to reaching my daily quota was 2 2/3rds pairs of shoes.

Do you think you have the mouse ability to be a successful shoe assembler?

PLAY SIM-SWEATSHOP

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: