Are Sweatshops Misogynistic Revenge?

The Misogynistic Marriage of Women and Transnational Corporate Supply Chains

David M. Boje

January 8, 2001

http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje (then press Sweatshops)

Introduction to Misogyny - My thesis is that global supply chains are misogynistic trade, part of a misogynistic conspiracy. Misogyny reflects the hateful attitudes of men towards women, to legitimate their punishment in late modern capitalism of global supply chains. There is a misogynistic marriage between punishing young women and male-dominated transnational corporate supply chains running from the male CEOs of Wal-Mart, Nike, Reebok, Gap and other billion dollar marketeers to the female labor forces in sweatshops of Asia, Latin America, and right here in New Mexico and Texas. Each corporation tries to explain why it was not as misogynistic as the others. I think there is a good deal of racism and sexism in the corporate supply chains.  In the sweatshops where corporations subcontract, young women are vulnerable, almost childlike and subservient females doing the work, and being punished I guess for their past transgressions against the male species. In the advertising young women are the sex objects selling the sweaty products with a transparent chauvinistic misogynistic bravado. Misogyny is an attitude legitimated in Greek mythology.

Figure One: Pandora lets out the Evil Influence on the Unsuspecting and Innocent Male Please Contact Stephanie Law  at ShadowScapes http://www.shadowscapes.com.who has graciously allowed me to use her wondrous artwork. 

Woman is the wrath of Zeus,
a gift given in place of fire -
cruel counter-gift! For she
burns a man with cares and
withers him up and brings old
age on youth too soon
(Women in the Greek World - Greek Anthology 9.165.1-4 ). 

What is a Sweatshop? A sweatshop is a workplace where workers are subject to (Adapted from S11):

• extreme exploitation, including the absence of a living wage or benefits and forced overtime,

• poor working conditions, such as health and safety hazards, and

• arbitrary discipline including physical and mental abuse, fines for talking, taking of worker-wage deposits to keep workers from leaving.

Are sweatshops misogynistic?  When advertising is so much about the equality and empowerment of women, consumers are seduced to overlook the misogynist reality of sweatshops while at the same time being conditioned to accept the women's fate. I think the misogyny is the whole relationship between rich and powerful billion dollar transorganizational corporations, their subcontracting sweatshops, subservient women, and the conditioning of consumers to accept the status quo is important for us to look at.

    The marriage between young women in sweatshops and their transnational corporate supply chain partners is patriarchcal. Corporate males are scared what would happen if Pandora escaped from the sweatshop. On the one hand there is the sexual commodification of women to sell the products to women, while denying their sisters' enslavement in sweatshops around the world. Either way women's bodies are sexually commodities, "sweated" for mega profits while subservient workers receive pennies. A perfect misogynistic male fantasy that legitimates the kinds of male aggression towards women that is so prevalent in sweatshops. The fear is what would Pandora do if she escaped?

    When women say "no" to transnational corporate sweatshop supply chain employment and to their torment, their voices can not be heard above the spectacle of corporate advertising about empowered women and CEO speeches about the effectiveness of their codes of conduct and monitoring efforts.  Don't you marvel at how the male CEO is rescuing the sweaty female from a life of prostitution and starvation by employing her in his sweatshop? It is like the myth about rape, "she wanted it."

    Today, I wish to address the roots of this misogyny and a number of recurring motifs of patriarchal hegemony in the treatment of women in sweatshops and economic systems of oppression, suppression, and testocracy.

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What is a Sweatshop?

What is a Sweatshop? The name, sweatshop, goes back to the late 1800s, and refers to a subcontracting system called "sweating." The idea is to "sweat" as much profit as possible out of each worker. Once a thriving tradition at the turn of the century, sweatshops saw their numbers dwindle in the face of relentless encroachment by labor organization and social legislation. Today, supply chain middlemen still earn their profits from the margin between the amount they received for a sub contract and the amount they pay workers. "Sweating" means paying the least wages for the most hours.

The US General Accounting Office defines a sweatshop as a business that regularly violates wage, child labor, health and/or safety laws. There are other definitions. Some include young adults who work in sweatshops, not just in the third world, but in major metropolitan cities in late capitalist economies. 

 "Investigators for U.S. labor and human-rights groups estimate that Asia and Latin America have thousands of sweatshops, which do everything from force employees to work 16-hour days to cheat them out of already meager wages, that make products for U.S. and European companies. ``It would be extremely generous to say that even 10% of [Western companies charged with abuses] have done anything meaningful about labor conditions,'' says S. Prakash Sethi, a Baruch College business professor who helped set up a monitoring system for Mattel at its dozen factories in China, Indonesia, Mexico, and elsewhere. Abuses may actually be proliferating" (Bernstein, 2000: 52).

Sweatshops is not just a problem in Asia and Latin America. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that there are over 7000 sweatshops in the U.S.

• WHEREAS, the General Accounting Office has estimated that there are over 7,000 sweatshops in U.S. cities such as New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and El Paso

• Sweatshops are part of the underground economy, operating in violation of state and federal laws. The General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated that 2,000 of 6,000 garment shops in New York City, and most of the 5,000 garment shops in Los Angeles operated in violation of the minimum wage, overtime, or child labor provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1994. The GAO found sweatshop conditions also existed in Miami, El Paso, New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Portland, Oregon. (1997 Clay Measure to Stop Sweatshops). 

• Some 250 million children are put to work in poor countries, and at home the Labor Department recently reported that nearly two-thirds of cutting and sewing shops in Los Angeles fail to comply with the minimum wage laws (Source, How to Battle Sweatshops 02/02/2001 The Washington Post). 
  

   

Sweatshops in New Mexico 

Luis de Rosa was a former governor of New Mexico. He arrived in Santa Fe during 1637. He constantly clashed with the friars in the area. The governor ruled with an extreme authority that bordered on tyranny.  Rosa discovered the means used by previous governors for exploiting the Indians for profit and implemented these same tools.  He went to the pueblos demanding that the Indians weave blankets and other textiles which were to be delivered to him. In Santa Fe, he built a sweatshop and forced Christian Pueblos, unconverted Apache, and Ute captives under the sentence of servitude to work in these shops (Spanish Period of Sweatshops in New Mexico). 

Time Line

• Luis de Rosa governor of New Mexico opens sweatshop in Santa Fe during 1637.

• Adam Smith 1776 calls for living wage

• Karl Marx 1867 calls for end to sweating

• Frederick Taylor 1911 says Scientific Management is the answer to sweatshops

• 1980s Growth of global sourcing to sweatshops

• 1992 Levi-Strauss and Wal-Mart develops 1st Code of Conduct, Nike in 1993.

• 1997 - social Accountability 8000 standards

• 1998 United Students Against Sweatshops - Workers Rights Consortium

 

The Electronic Age of Sweatshops

• E-Sweatshops are "engaged in data processing, accepting airplane and hotel reservations, taking telephone sales orders, or otherwise moving information along. Equipped with trusty headset and keyboard, these workers represent what may become a large part of the nation's future employment profile" 

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Sweatshops in the U.S.

• On Aug. 2, 1995, authorities freed 72 workers from the San Gabriel Valley apartment complex where some had worked as long as seven years behind razor wire and locked doors (Kang, Connie).
• 1995 Minnie Roe's journal of life in a sweatshop.
• On April 29, 1996 Charles Kernaghan (labor movement's mouse that roared) very badly embarrassed Kathie Lee Gifford by telling a Congressional committee about conditions at Global Fashions, a Honduran factory that made her sportswear, where 5 year old girls earn 31 cents an hour and work 75 hour weeks.
• 1997 - Feminists Against Sweatshop investigation of U.S. Garment District. "Inside were approximately 25 Chinese and Latino men. They stood (all day I was told) over waist-high work benches, measuring and cutting fabric. Their manager sat in the corner at a desk with a fan. He was Korean, like 80% of all Manhattan garment industry contractors... None of the workers would speak unless spoken to. Punishments for speaking during working hours, one of our guides told us, could range from physical punishment to firing."
  • "On the 9th floor we found more children who were working. Two young boys were standing next to a towering pile of sleeves, turning them right side out, one by one. The boys were eight and ten years old."
• US Department of Labor estimates are that 50% of U.S. garment industry factories meet the definition of sweatshop.
• The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 officially prohibits sweatshops.
  

What did Karl Marx (1867), Adam Smith (1776), and Frederick Taylor (1911) have in common? 

ANSWER - They agreed that there are viable ethical alternatives to sweatshops that yield more productivity, profit, and net workers higher wages.  This does not mean there are not misogynistic. 

Did Adam Smith  favor sweatshops? Concerning the issue of wage rates, Smith (1776) in the  Wealth of Nations, saw the choice about paying each worker a "living wage" was clear, economic and moral:

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation (Smith, 1776, CHAPTER VIII Of the Wages of Labor). 

Adam Smith, among others, contended that interests of self-centered interests of merchants and manufacturers ran counter to the general welfare of society.  Smith advocated local accountability, moral reasoning, and a limit to bigness of business. Smith did favor the landowners over the merchants and manufacturers.

The proprietor of land is necessarily a citizen of the particular country in which his estate lies.  The proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country (WN, 2: 848).

Smith argued for the primacy of agrarian capitalism over industrial capitalism.

What did Frederick Taylor Think of Sweatshops? What was revolutionary about Taylor's scientific management, was the observation that rest and refreshment are necessary to quality and sustained work. Any profit gained by overwork and snatching time for mealtimes and rest breaks and from paying the least possible bare subsistence wage and over-work in unhealthy and unpleasant situations was meager compared to the output of the high productivity enterprise. In short, both Taylor and Marx held out solutions to sweatshops' "slow sacrifice of humanity" (Marx, 1867: 244).

For example, going back to Taylor (1911), his innovation in pay schemes was to introduce the idea of differential piece-rate systems. In his series of experiments he demonstrated that workers when performing a carefully calibrated and planned task, would increase their effort when wages increased by 60 per cent (p. 74). In short, raising quotas and extending the working day, were found to be less productive alternatives than ensuring "prosperity for the employee, coupled with prosperity for the employer" the key to his compensation philosophy.

For Taylor, the solution to feudalistic sweatshop factories was to convince employee and employer, that through scientific experimentation, work conditions and work processes could be redesigned so that workers toiled few hours, with more rest breaks, and at higher pay, while the firm enjoyed the fruits of sharp increases in production. It is our proposal to test Taylor's option in the apparel industry. That is to move from what is called "extreme Taylorism" managing work processes with central control and high division of labor, to what Taylor had originally described, a system of work which is productive for employers and prosperous for employees.

Taylor (1911: 14-18) argued that it is possible to have prosperity for both owners and workers and the diminution of poverty and the alleviation of human suffering. We believe this is an attainable objective for the Nike corporation, its subcontractors, and global workforce. Taylor concludes, "the writer has great sympathy with those who are over-worked, but on the whole a greater sympathy for those who are under paid" (p. 18). This is the gist of our attempt to prove that living wage payment and healthy working conditions combined with scientific work processes makes economic sense.

What did Marx say about Sweatshops? For Marx, piece-wage was a special form of time-wage. "In time-wages the labor is measured by its immediate duration, in piece-wages by the quantity of products in which the labor has embodied itself during a given time" (1867: 553). And piece-wages, from his point of view, afforded the "source of reductions of wages and capitalistic cheating" of workers (p. 553). That is, with piece-wages, the incentive is for the capitalist to parasitically "sub-let" labor by using the services of middlemen (subcontractors). "In England this system is characteristically called the "Sweating system."

On the one hand piece-wage allows the capitalist to make a contract for so much per piece with the head laborer--in manufactures with the chief of some group, in mines with the extract of the coal, in the factory with the actual machine-worker--at a price for which the head laborer himself undertakes the enlisting and payment of his assistant workpeople (p. 554).

To Marx, it is in the personal interest of the subcontractor using piece-wage systems to "strain his labor-power as intensely as possible" by lengthening the working-day. And this is exactly what we have witnessed in apparel manufacture: without the external control of government or the global enterprise's policies and codes, subcontractors use piece-wage and extend the working day, as well as the number of days worked each month. In Marx's day, the "Children's Employment Commission: and other agencies intervened to change working and employment practices.

Piece-wage is the main pay system in today's apparel subcontract factory. Marx hypothesized that piece-wage is paid such that it becomes the average wage, thereby negating any incentive for independence, self-control, or liberty. "Piece-work has, therefore, a tendency, while raising the individual wages above the average, to lower this average itself" for the workforce. In practice, the quotas in the apparel industry are adjusted to keep the piece-wage to a bare minimum and working conditions such as rest periods and subcontractors avoid training in more efficient production methods, unless external controls are enforced. The assumption of the subcontractor is that since the alternative to work is starvation or more rigorous demands of agriculture, those workers have ample incentive to produce. This is defined here, as feudalistic sweatshop practice. We would like to conduct research that would implement and test experiments in alternative pay schemes.

 

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Is the Sweatshop Misogynistic? 

The supply chain running from First World mega corporations to Third World sweatshops is thoroughly misogynistic. Supply chains see women as possessions, dumb and subservient, and more efficient and productive that way. These women, we are told, need a good dose of corporate discipline to make them better global citizens. It is OK for U.S. companies, including Wal-Mart, Toys 'R; Us, Gap, Nike, and Reebok to subcontract with sweatshops in Asia and Latin America as long as they don't get caught. There most be a camouflage of plausible denial. Most just claim their good are not made in sweatshops. 

Story 1 - Wal-Mart and Liu Zhang

David Glass is President & CEO of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart was Named  "Sweatshop Retailer of the Year on June 19, 2000 by the Maquila Solidarity Network, hosting the first annual Canadian Sweatshop Awards in Toronto, Ontario. 

In 1992 Wal-Mart minted its Code of Conduct. With the Kathie Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal of 1997 Wal-Mart demanded its subcontractors sign a code of basic labor standards. The scandal brought in Clinton and the Apparel Partnership spectacle. This led to the formation of the Fair Labor Association by Kathie Lee, the White House and corporations such as Nike and the Gap in 1998. The action shifted from self-policing codes to corporate controlled policing of those codes by consultants (Global Alliance), auditors (PWC), and trade associations (FLA). Anything to avoid the independent monitoring (e.g. WRC). 

This first story (summarized from Bernstein, 2000) is about a male sweatshop worker, caught up in this misogynistic world of sweatshops in China. Liu Zhang decided to take a feminized job at the Chun Si Enterprise Handbag Factory in Zhongshan in southern China to get a permit to keep from being arrested as a vagrant. The factory is owned by Chun Kwan, a Macau businessman.  This factory makes those Kathie Lee Gifford handbags sold to the Wal-Mart. Though she initially issued a press release denying that Wal-Mart had any relationship with Chun Si.  Liu is 32 years old a former farmer and construction worker. He needs a temporary residence permit to avoid being locked up by the policy in a special detention center.  

 

• Liu found that Chun Si's 900 workers were locked in the walled factory compound for all but a total of 60 minutes a day for meals.

• The factory gave Liu an expired temporary-resident permit, but Liu had to turn over his personal identification card. "This left him a virtual captive." Leave the neighborhood and you are arrested. 

• The Chun Si factory charges workers $15 a month for food and lodging in crowded dorms and pays them only $22 a month. 

• Guards regularly punched and hit workers for talking back to managers or even for walking too fast, Liu says. 

• The fine is $1 for taking too long in the bathroom. This is a lot considering his take home pay is less than $7 a month.

• Chun Si began requiring cash payments for dinner.

• Chin Si did not pay overtime rates.

• Chun Si set up a phony factory to dupe Wal-Mart's auditors. 

• In three months of 90 hour work weeks, after the deductions, Liu on average earned about 1/2 cent per hour. 

Liu and 60 other workers marched to the local labor office to protest Chun Si. 

THE COVER UP - Creating a Phony Factory. 

• Price Waterhouse Coopers inspected Chun Si five times in 1999, finding it did not pay legal overtime rate and required excessive work hours. But PWC auditors failed to uncover more egregious conditions despite interviews with dozens of workers. 

• Kathie Lee hired Cal Safety to inspect the factory four times from March to December of 1999. These audits missed the more serious abuses. After the March, 1999 Cal Safety inspection, Wal-Mart told Chin Si to clean up the violations or the contract would be pulled. 

  1. Chun Si gave its factories a face lift, painting walls, clearing workshops, and putting in high-quality toilet paper. 

  2. Management split the factory into two groups. 200 workers were assigned to the fixed-up second floor and 700 to the fourth floor. 

  3. Management told auditors and the 700 workers on the fourth floor that these workers no longer worked for Chun Si. 

  4. The 700 signed new labor contracts with Yecheng, the new factory. They received low pay, 14-hour days, paid exorbitant feeds for meals, etc. while the 200 were paid the local minimum wage of $55 a month and no longer had to do mandatory overtime.

  5. A new sign went up in the 200 space, "Wal-Mart Supplier." There was even a 1-800-WM-Ethic line. 

  6. On December 10th a notice went out that all workers would be required to pay cash for dinner in addition to the money subtracted from their paychecks as before. 

  So Liu and other workers protested the illegal fees and poverty wages.  

Story 2 - Wal-Mart in Other Locations

• When you purchase a shirt in Wal-Mart, do you ever imagine young women in Bangladesh forced to work from 7:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., seven days a week, paid just 9 cents to 20 cents an hour, who are denied health care and maternity leave; screamed at to work faster; with monitored bathroom visits; and who will be fired for daring to complain or ask for their rights?  (Source)

• At the Beximco factory in the Dhaka Export Processing Zone in Bangladesh, there are 1,000 workers, at least 80 percent of them young women, sewing shirts and pants for Wal-Mart and other retailers. Beximco is a sweatshop, where human rights are systematically violated. Wal-Mart and its contractor pay no taxes to sew their garments in the Dhaka EPZ. (Source) 

  • Daily work shift: 7:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. 
    

  • Seven days a week: Monday through Sunday 
    

  • At the factory 87 hours a week -- paid for 80 hours (the hour lunch break is unpaid) 
    

  • Paid less than 1/3 of the legal overtime rate 
    

  • Not uncommon to be forced to remain in the factory beyond 8:00 p.m., working a 24-hour shift right through the night 
    

  • Days off are very rare 

• She ain't gonna take any of this misogynistic stick anymore -  “Eighty-three percent of the products Wal-Mart sells is made offshore and by young folks working in subhuman conditions, paid slave wages and not allowed to organize,” said Cathy DeSantis, a member of the Interfaith Committee on Worker Issues, the organization that sponsored the rally. 
  “We want to break the Wal-Mart myth that everything is ‘Made in America,’ ” said DeSantis. (Wal-Mart Watch) - 

• See Also Kathie Lee once again. 

 

Story 3 - Nike and the Sweatshop Supply Chain

Ms. Lap Nguyen was forced out of her Nike factory job in Vietnam following her interview with the ESPN program that was televised. She was also interviewed in the 1996 60 Minutes expose on Nike in Vietnam.  The point is that being interviewed can have disciplinary results.   (Source NikeWatch Campaign of Australia). 

Time Line for Lap Nguyen and Nike For complete time line of events See Nike In The News; For items relevant to Nike's Stock Prices, see Nike stock stories. See year by year Nike chronology. 1995 - October -  Nguyen Thi Lap starts working for Sam Yang (Korean owned) sneaker factory in Ku Chi, Vietnam. Her employee number is 11204.  March, 1996 she was promoted to section (team) leader of sewing line number 15.  1996 - March 31 - The headline story in The Vietnam Worker newspaper on March 31, 1996 proclaimed, "Foreign Technician Strikes 15 Vietnamese Workers." The same newspaper, on April 1, 1996, proclaimed: At Sam Yang Company, Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City , Korean Technical Employee Strikes Many Vietnamese Female Workers. It went on to say that immediately after the incident took place, 970 workers on strike to protest the mistreatment of their fellow workers (See Vietnam Labor Watch Report). 1996 - October 17 - CBS News 48 Hours transcript, October 17, 1996. CBS News. (c) MCMXCVI, CBS, Inc. Transcript of Roberta Baskins on site visit to Nike in Vietnam   This was the first interview with Nguyen Thi Lap a team leader in Nike's Sam Yang (Korean owned) sneaker factory in Ku Chi, Vietnam.  Nguyen Thi Lap's Her basic wage, even as a sewing team leader, still doesn't amount to the minimum wage, $42 a month for working six days a week.  Lap puts in more overtime than the annual Vietnam legal limit of 200 hours.  Lap " and 14 other team leaders were singled out and punished by their Korean supervisor, Madame Baeck, seen here sitting at a table with the Nike shoe she used to hit the women. It was in retaliation for some poor sewing. " Two were later sent to the hospital (Nguyen, Vietnam Labor Watch Report March 29, 1997). Madame Baeck was convicted, but was allowed to leave the country after the incident, despite conviction (source).  1997, March 29 Vietnam Labor Watch Report is released that includes study of the Sam Yang factory March 29, 1997, after businessman Thuyen Nguyen returned from 16-day Fact-Finding Tour of Vietnam Factories in Vietnam. 1998 - April 2, ESPN's "Outside the Lines" ran an hour-long show on Nike and Reebok sweatshop abuses in Vietnam (Sweatshop Watch). This was based on ESPN's visit to Vietnam factories in February, 1998 (See Globe Project, Vietnam).  In February, 1998, ESPN interviewed Nguyen Thi Lap, a senior worker with an exemplary history at Nike's Samyang plant in Ku Chi "When I went to the interview" says Lap (in 2000 ESPN Interview aired in December), " the Korean manager kept suggesting to me that as an employee of the company I always had to speak well for the company." In February and March, 1998 Lap worked 113 hours of overtime (200 is legal limit).  Lap was demoted several times after the April, 1998 interviews with ESPN aired.  When she fell ill, she says she was denied medical leave, eventually forced to quit her job, and then diagnosed with tuberculosis.  Lap is currently unemployed.  1998 - May 12 - Phil Knight spoke May 12th,1998  to the National Press Club Luncheon.  One month after the ESPN report aired, A California class action suit was filed (and dropped in 1999), and the Ernst and Young audit was front page news (they were dropped and Price Waterhouse Coopers now does the audits). So, Phil Knight, CEO of Nike announced major reforms.  Phil Knight said: "One columnist said, 'Nike represents not only everything that's wrong with sports, but everything that's wrong with the world.'  So I figured that I'd just come out and let you journalists have a look at the great Satan up close and personal" (May, 1998).  2000 - Thuyen Nguyen's interview with Nguyen Thi Lap (a second copy is on the Clean Clothes Campaign Web site, and what happened to Lap). Thuyen Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American business man who has traveled to Vietnam to verify working conditions first hand.   2000- Chairman Phil Knight withdrew a $30 million contribution to the University of Oregon, which is Knight's alma matter. It is one of 45 universities that have joined Worker's Right Consortium (WRC), a student-backed anti-sweatshop group (See New York Times,  " Sweatshop King: Nike Exec Reneges On $30 Million Pledge" by Steven Greenhouse, April 25, 2000). See also Knight, P. H. 2000, 'Statement from Nike Founder & CEO Philip H. Knight Regarding the University of Oregon', Nike's web site , Portland.  2000- December - ESPN's Monthly Outside the Lines 10th Anniversary show which aired in December, 2000. This was their 10th Anniversary show. (See Globe Project, Vietnam).

We could also talk about Reebok and Workers Fired for Speaking to the Press- 

• Thi Lieu was a 22-year-old worker in Reebok's Powyen  (Pou Chen?) factory. Lieu was fired after the ESPN report aired in April, 1998, then rehired after ESPN protests to Reebok. 
• In Spring 2000 (before August), Thi Lieu was let go along with 3000 other employees,  "When their contracts expired so they could be replaced by minimum wage workers, a common practice.

 

Story 4 - Sweatshops and El Paso 

• IVARRA IS CURRENTLY THE DIRECTOR of El Paso's Mujer Obrera, an educational and advocacy agency for the Hispanic women who work in the city's garment industry. She says ""Here in El Paso, the community is anti-union," Ivarra says flatly. That is why, she says, El Paso's working women turn instead to Mujer Obrera for help—not to the unions." (Source).

• According to a GAO report, in El Paso: 50 of 180 garment factories are sweatshops (Unite).

• On August 29, 1997, more than 200 employees of Greater Texas Finishing Corporation, a division of Sun Apparel Inc., were laid off on August 29, 1997 when the company moved its production to Mexico (Corporate Watch). (Also Sweatshop Watch). 

• El Paso's November teach-in focused on sweatshops, homework, border control as labor control, the attack on the 8-hour day, and women workers' double day, and included maquiladora workers, a UPS worker, UNITE staff, and many others (Campus Teach Ins). 

• This reminds me of sweatshops in the El Paso area, only because I had an opportunity to go there and talk to some of the women who work in those sweatshops. The fly-by-night employers leave without paying their employees, and the employees end up having to look for and force their
  employer to pay their wages. These employees have to find their employer and get the law to get after them (From Ontario).

• Levi Strauss has announced that it is closing three plants in El Paso, laying off more than 1,500 employees. Another three companies are expected to close down El Paso operations employing
  nearly 2,000 people by Christmas. [Workers Committee letter 11/12/97]

• IN EL PASO, TEXAS, the effects of five years of deindustrialization have been dramatic; many of the large garment assembly factories that used to dominate the city’s labor market have closed, moving across the border to Mexico or to cheaper labor markets overseas. In their place, smaller sweatshops have opened, paying low wages and offering few or no benefits, little job security and poor work conditions (Multinational Monitor, 1992).

  • With the support of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Mujer Obrera is currently striking against a small garment sewing shop called Sonia’s, a subcontractor for DCB Apparel, whose owner, Andreas Diaz, is infamous in El Paso. "Our goals include insuring paid overtime and sick leave, adequate ventilation, fire protection, safe machinery and pressuring the employers to provide legally binding personnel manuals," says Dominguez. Begun on April 29, 1991, the strike has spread to five other DCB subcontractors. A settlement has not yet been reached, but national pressure on the company is growing. Solidarity actions have been organized across the country to stop retailers from carrying Diaz’s line "Maximum Energy" and "Total Energy;" and J.C. Penney ’s, one of
    Diaz’s largest clients, has agreed to stop doing business with him until the strike is settled. The U.S. Attorney General’s office and the Department of Labor have also entered the fray by formally filing actions and restraining orders against Diaz (Multinational Monitor, 1992)

 

Additional References

Basinger, Julianne  (2000) "Economists take college presidents to task for joining anti-sweatshop groups." The Chronicle of Higher Education; Washington; Sep 29;  Volume:  47 Issue:  5, Page: A39. (200 Academic sign letter protesting their university presidents signing up for either FLA or WRC, arguing that basic academic research is needed and consultation with university faculty experts.

Bernstein, Aaron  with Michael Shari in Jakarta, and Elisabeth Malkin " A World of Sweatshops" Business Week, New York; November 6, 2000, Iss. 3706; Industrial/technology edition; pg. 52, 84.  

Boje, D. M. 1998e How Critical Theory and Critical Pedagogy can Unmask Nike's Labor Practices presented to the Critical Theory pre-conference of the Academy of Management meetings, San Diego, CA, August 8.

Boje, D. M. 1998f Nike, Greek Goddess of Victory or Cruelty? Women's Stories of Asian Factory Life Journal of Organizational Change Management. Vol. 11(6): 461-480. There is an interesting story behind this one. 

Boje, David M. and 45 Academic Scholars (2000) " Global Manufacturing and Taylorism Practices of Nike Corporation and its Subcontractors" Drafted September 16, 2000 and submitted to Nike Corporation to obtain permission to enter samples of factories (no money is requested). 

Dexter, Robert and Aaron Bernstein (2000) ""A Life of Fines and Beatings." Business Week. October 2, 2000.

Hsiao, Andrew (2000)  Standing up to the swoosh  The Village Voice; New York; Oct 10, 2000; Volume:  45 Issue:  40, Page:  41-43 (Article on James Keady).

Leatherman, Courtney (2001) "Union organizers propose code of university conduct." The Chronicle of Higher Education; Washington; Dec 1, 2000;  Volume: 47 Issue: 14: A16. 

Street, Scott (2001) "Colleges criticize conditions in factories that produce clothing with their logos." The Chronicle of Higher Education; Washington; Oct 20, Volume:  47 Issue:  8, Page:  A41.

Anti-Sweatshop Group Finds Abuses at Korean Factory That

  Produced College Apparel

Van Der Werf, Martin (2001) "Anti-Sweatshop Groups Find It Difficult to Turn Campus Idealism into Real Change. The Chronicle of Higher Education. January 5, p. A39.

 

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