Column

Sweatshops over there matter here

By ROBYN BLUMNER
Published November 4, 2007

The headline "Indian 'slave' children found making low-cost clothes destined for Gap" in last week's Observer online must have caused massive indigestion for the PR pixies who burnish the Gap's image as a good corporate egg.

The paper's investigation uncovered a Dickensian sweatshop in India where children as young as 10 toiled in slavelike conditions to produce Gap-labeled clothes. The children at the New Delhi factory were consigned to lives of deprivation and violence, forced to work 16-hour days and beaten if they cried from exhaustion. Some interviewed by the Observer hadn't been paid for months.

The Gap responded by agreeing not to sell any of the garments from the work order identified by the newspaper and reiterating that it has a "rigorous factory-monitoring program" to police against the use of child labor.

One is left to wonder, however, if a newspaper can smoke out a Gap-sponsored sweatshop, why couldn't the company's own team of professional auditors?

As horrific as child labor is, these working conditions wouldn't be any more palatable if someone 19 years old were subjected to them. Sweatshops, where workers are forced to work long hours, breathing toxic air, for pay that doesn't begin to cover the expenses of basic living, are a kind of ubiquitous evil in the developing world.

They exist in places like India and China where human beings are considered disposable and where government makes common cause with business interests to sabotage worker rights.

But what happens "over there" has everything to do with what happens here. American toy and apparel companies and retailers like Wal-Mart are largely responsible for allowing this kind of exploitation to flourish. They prime the pump and then fight against rules that would better the lot of workers.

One need look no further than the internal auditing documents on the Mattel toy company's Web site to see that the company knows what is going on and continues to profit from it.

Plant 18 located in the Dongguan Province of China isn't named, but its 2006 audit indicates that workers there are seriously mistreated. The audit found "important shortfalls" in "wages and working hours, health and safety standards, and environmental protection." The same problems were identified in an earlier review.

Workers were on the job up to 17 hours a day, and some were forced to work 31 straight days without a day off. The report also found that the workers were exposed to "air, water and ground contamination," and there were serious questions about whether they were being cheated out of pay.

A Mattel representative claims they have "made headway with improvements."

Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee, can give you an earful about Mattel's practices in China. In testimony last month before a Senate subcommittee, he laid out in rather stomach-turning detail the pound of flesh extracted from workers in the manufacture of a Barbie accessory toy at the Xin Yi factory in Shenzhen.

Last year, that factory's 5,000 workers were made to work seven days a week for months on end, with routine 15-hour days. In the steaming, hot factory, workers were barred from standing during work hours. They had to sit on hard wood benches with no backs.

Things have slightly improved this year, according to Kernaghan, with a six-day work week. Still, the workers report being regularly cheated out of the equivalent of two days' wages every week, even though their base wage is only 53 cents an hour.

Mattel claims it doesn't operate at the Xin Yi factory, one of its licensees does, nonetheless it has "dispensed an audit team to the facility."

Another abuse-ridden report for the Web site, perhaps?

According to Kernaghan, Mattel has in the past sought and obtained special waivers in China so it could pay workers less than the legal minimum wage. It also has gotten waivers to allow it to force workers to do 32 hours of overtime a week - an amount that is 295 percent above China's legal limit.

Parents rightly reacted fiercely when lead paint was found on some of their children's Chinese-made toys. Now we just need that same intense anger on behalf of the young workers making them. We need some national consciousness-raising that will goose Congress into passing the Decent Working Conditions and Fair Competition Act, a bill that would make it illegal to sell goods made in a sweatshop.

In the documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China, Mardi Gras revelers were shown video of the Chinese factory where young women toiled to make the very beads they now had piled around their necks. Most were seriously discomforted by the sight. Americans don't want to buy goods made by people forced to work to exhaustion, around toxic fumes, for unsustainable pay, even if that means a good bargain.

I believe that, truly.

[Last modified November 3, 2007, 21:13:14]