The Devil's Bargain: Sweatshops
and the American Scheme
By John W. Whitehead
“They hit you…They
hit you in the head…To make you work faster.” —Nicaraguan Factory
Worker
The so-called season
of giving is officially behind us. Even in these sluggish economic
times, Americans still managed to spend more than $50 billion in
gift-giving. Now that all the gifts have been opened, all that is
left is for us to enjoy them.
Yet I can’t help but
wonder whether our pleasure would be dimmed were we to truly
understand what is involved in bringing these gifts—at the bargain
prices Americans love—to our homes?
Writing for the Texas
Observer, Josh Rosenblatt notes in “Buy Some Stuff, Enslave
Somebody” that “the expanding global economy demands that
corporations seek out the cheapest possible labor to maximize
profit, and stimulate growth and innovation. With free trade has
come an explosion of global inequality that has left more than 2.8
billion people living on less than $2 a day.”
This inequality makes
it possible for Americans to buy more and more while paying less and
less. But as the National Labor Committee (NLC), an organization
that investigates and exposes human and labor rights abuses
committed by U.S. companies producing goods in the developing world,
points out, “The people who stitch together our jeans and assemble
our CD-players are mostly young women in Central America, Mexico,
Bangladesh, China and other poor nations, many working 12 to 14-hour
days for pennies an hour.”
Some in the business
world insist that the business sector’s efforts to tap into the vast
pool of willing and cheap labor in poorer countries are all about
free market economics. However, critics such as the NLC consider the
resulting dehumanization of this new global workforce to be the
overwhelming moral crisis of the 21st century.
Unfortunately, this
remains a moral crisis largely ignored by the American
people—except, of course, for the occasional media blitz when a
celebrity is found to be peddling wares manufactured in sweatshop
conditions. For instance, who could forget the media circus
surrounding talk-show personality Kathie Lee Gifford’s tearful 1996
confession that her clothing line, which was being sold in Wal-Mart
stores across America, was indeed being produced in Honduran
sweatshops that employed young girls and pregnant women to sew
garments for 20 hours per day in extreme heat for only 31 cents an
hour?
Chain retailers like
Wal-Mart that sell low-cost goods manufactured overseas by workers
who are allegedly paid less than the minimum wage, forced to work
long hours, not given overtime pay and even beaten in order to keep
them working grueling shifts have become easy targets for human
rights groups. The company that once urged consumers to “Buy
American” is currently the largest importer of goods made in China,
which is one of the world’s worst labor abusers. Yet Wal-Mart was
not the first company to take advantage of cheap global labor in
order to achieve a bigger bottom line, nor will it be the last to do
so. Furthermore, mega-retailers are not solely to blame.
We, the American
consumer, have perfected the art of indulgence and avoidance. As
Rosenblatt observes, “We in the wealthy West, living and dining off
the fruits of their labor, can honestly say we are unaware of the
devil’s bargain we bought into. Or that if we do know, the problem
is simply too great to comprehend and beyond our means to do
anything about, save changing our lifestyles entirely. Best, in
other words, not to think about it.”
However, we must
think about it. And in thinking about it, at some point we must
realize that there is a moral dimension to our buying habits. As
long as we are willing to buy, buy, buy at lower and lower prices
without a care for how those goods were produced or where they came
from, corporations will continue to seek out cheap labor, which
invariably goes hand in hand with inhumane working conditions.
Thus, change must
start with you. For starters, you can check out the National Labor
Committee’s website, www.nlcnet.org, for a list of companies with
questionable ties to sweatshops and cheap labor. If you’re not
willing to stop doing business with those companies, then you can at
least urge them to change their practices.
Savitri Durkee and
William Talen, leaders of the Church of Stop Shopping, star in a
documentary making its way across the country, What Would Jesus Buy?
They believe now is a good time to urge companies which have given
into pressure on climate concerns by becoming more environmentally
friendly to recognize human rights concerns by committing to carry
goods manufactured in worker-protected environments.
You should also
encourage your local church or synagogue to take a moral stand
against sweatshop labor. Christ advocated for the poor and urged his
followers to reach out to the less fortunate. Christian
organizations that claim to emulate Christ should speak out against
slave labor. If only large Christian ministries would take a stand
and urge their parishioners to boycott large chains that foster
inhumane labor practices and working conditions, it could go a long
way toward changing conditions around the world.
Finally, the next
time you head out the door in search of another great deal, remember
that your bargain could be coming at someone else’s expense. For
instance, here’s what a report on a Korean-owned factory had to say
about its working conditions:
Toilets and canteens were unsanitary.
Some managers screamed at workers or pressured those who complained
to resign. And many women, who comprise 88% of the plant’s workers,
said they were denied time off for doctors’ appointments. One
pregnant worker who had a note from her doctor about a high-risk
pregnancy was not allowed to leave until five hours after she
complained of pain. She lost the baby.
Constitutional attorney and
author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford
Institute. He can be contacted at
johnw@rutherford.org.
Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at
www.rutherford.org.
