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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan.25, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Throughout the summer and fall of 1995, a national protest campaign was aimed at the GAP and other clothing-store chains. It was designed to pressure them to improve conditions, pinpointing an El Salvador sweatshop in particular.
Workers there are mostly teenaged women. Toiling in conditions of near-slavery, subjected to terror and violence at any hint of union activity, they sew many of the clothes the GAP sells in the United States.
The GAP struggle culminated in a gain in late December, according to information released by the National Labor
The pact reversed the GAP's earlier moves. First, in the face of a mounting national furor at revelations of the horrors at the Mandarin plant, the company had conducted its own "investigation"--and found no serious abuses at the plant.
When that only fueled the protests, the chain stopped doing business with Mandarin. The workers were left jobless.
So the struggle continued, leading to the December agreement.
UNITE and the NLC have ended the public campaign against the GAP.
Now, organizers say, they will embark on a broad effort to spotlight and fight against the horrible conditions faced by millions of garment workers. Its theme: "Fight Sweatshops At Home & Abroad."
Such a fight is badly needed. It could strengthen the labor movement. But how should it be carried out? What should be the target? And who are labor's allies?
Last August, a sweatshop raid revealed that Thai immigrant women had been held in involuntary servitude in an El Monte, Calif., plant. The garments they made were shipped to most of the big clothing retailers in the United States.
Tens of thousands of workers face similar conditions in California alone. There are tens of thousands more in Texas, Florida, and the Northeast.
Most of the workers are women. There are children, too. Most are immigrants from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and sometimes from the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Many are undocumented.
The retail industry manages to exploit these workers' labor so effectively as to create a very high profit margin.
Shop owners utterly ignore labor laws that would somewhat limit the rate of exploitation--laws dictating work hours, health and safety, minimum wages, and union rights. Then they sell the product to designer brands--big names like Jessica McClintock and Liz Claiborne--and stores like J.C. Penney, Macy's, Neiman Marcus, the GAP and others.
The stores in turn mark the goods up even further before selling them. It's a chain of super-exploitation.
Those who own and control the means of production and distribution, from the sweatshops and sewing machines to the mega-stores selling the finished product, all profit hugely from the workers' labor. The biggest fish--the retail chains--grab the biggest share of the booty.
Increasingly, the superstores' profits can be traced to workers in the Third World. Garments are sewn in other countries and shipped back across the border for sale here.
Why? For higher profits.
U.S. retailers face fierce competition in an ever-more- monopolized industry. As even some bourgeois analysts commented after an exceptionally poor showing this past holiday season, retail space has been overproduced--too many stores are competing, which drives down each store's share of retail sales.
At the same time, mergers and buyouts have created huge conglomerates that are heavily indebted to the banks--and driven to seek further profits. The move to restructure, which includes closing stores and laying off workers, partly arises out of this.
Restructuring also includes searching for ways to squeeze further profits out of production workers. More and more frequently, that search leads to the countries that have been impoverished by imperialist exploitation.
Garment factories in the United States close as retailers opt for the bigger bucks to be had off the backs of super- oppressed workers in other countries.
Who work as much as 20 hours a da. For under a dollar a day. In sweatshops that are either owned by or under contract to big U.S. firms.
It would seem, then, that the target of a campaign against sweatshops would have to be the garment industry, the bosses whose search for profit creates these hellish horror shops. That target would at least include the manufacturers, name- brand and no-name labels, retail stores, and banks.
To serve labor's interests--and to be effective--a drive against sweatshops would also have to emphasize international worker solidarity. It would bring U.S. unions into joint action with their counterparts in Mexico, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc., in a fight for the common interests of workers in all these countries.
The National Labor Committee and UNITE are moving in the right direction: multinational and cross-border organizing.
UNITE has opened "Worker Justice Centers" on both coasts, focusing on organizing immigrant workers. According to reports in its newspaper, UNITE is also working to deepen ties and build support for unions in Central America and Asia.
Furthermore, the U.S. union seems to have dropped the jingoistic "buy American" slogan that pitted workers here against those in other countries.
All these are very positive developments. The NLC and UNITE should be commended.
It's also constructive to educate shoppers and urge them to seek out garments with a union label, as NLC/UNITE literature does. However, with its heavy emphasis on the role of the consumer, the campaign stops short.
It leaves the real culprits largely off the hook. Consumers, after all, don't exploit sweatshop employees.
Owners do.
UNITE's proposal for a "National Partnership for Responsibility"--a partnership among the unions, the government and the garment industry--is off the mark. So is applause for Labor Secretary Robert Reich's "good guys" list of designers and retail chains that have signed a pledge on their honor not to do business with sweatshops.
The business class has no honor. It can't and won't police itself to stop doing what it is driven to do--increase profits by heightening worker exploitation.
Labor and capital can never be "partners." Their interests are diametrically opposed.
The government is not a neutral player, either. In the war between the classes it serves only one master: the ruling class.
That's not just a general principle. Reich and the Clinton administration have proved it repeatedly in practice--from letting anti-scab legislation die on the vine to proposing easing restrictions on company unions.
Nevertheless, the enemy class can be moved. Better conditions for garment workers could prove to be in the bosses' interest--if labor action convinces them of it.
Unfortunately unions in this country won't identify the real source of the sweatshop system--capitalism. Even so, though, they can step up the struggle and go after the profit-hungry companies that are profiting from workers' misery.
The new AFL-CIO leadership has promised to back militant fights to defend workers' rights. Why not take them up on it?
Why not mobilize workers, students and youth, and communities in a real partnership to wage a hard-hitting national battle that really ups the ante and goes on the offensive to end sweatshops once and for all?
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