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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 7, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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'No, no, no to sweatshops!'

On the busiest shopping day of the year--"Thanksgiving" Friday, Nov. 24--on the ritziest, most expensive street in Manhattan, some 200 activists delivered this message: "No, no, no to sweatshops."

Union members, community activists, college and high-school students joined the protest. After starting at NikeTown on 57th Street, marchers in this fourth annual Global Sweatshop Coalition action headed down Fifth Avenue. They stopped at the Gap, Lord & Taylor, Disney--just a few of the big stores that depend on sweatshop labor for their big profits.

At the protest rally Paul Baiserman of TechNika told those gathered: "Students in Taipei, Taiwan, protested at a Chentex board meeting in support of Chentex strikers in Managua, Nicaragua. They said no, no, no to sweatshops. So can we. What goes on in Haiti, Nicaragua, Indonesia, affects us!"

The Chentex strikers were fired for demanding a raise of 8 cents a day.

Shana Agid of Critical Resistance talked about the 2 million people in this country who are in the sweatshops called prisons. The prison-industrial complex here in the United States is as profitable as the sweatshops abroad.

Christian Lemoins of the Disney-Haiti Justice Campaign raised the struggle of Cointreaux workers in northern Haiti.

--Story and photo by G. Dunkel

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