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Date of publication: December 30, 2004

Source: Maui Time Weekly

Author: Anthony Pignataro

It typically takes 15 people to make a t-shirt. One worker will sew the shirt's lower hem. Two people will work on sleeve - one closes the sleeve, one closes the shoulder. Another worker sews the shoulders. Two people will work on the collar - one sewing the top stitch, the other the bottom. Then someone works on the reinforcements inside the shoulders. Then another four workers put the sleeves on the shirt, while a couple workers inspect.

All that has to happen in less than three minutes. That's because each 15-person unit has to put together about 3,400 shirts each day. In return for that 10 or 12-hour day, each worker will make about $7. In addition, each 15 - member unit works in a factory that can hold 40 or so groups at a time. The factories - many call them sweatshops - are filled with machinery, dust and lint. They're located in the free - trade zones of Central America - Honduras, El Salvador - and are sub-contracted by big apparel corporations like Hanes, Fruit of the Loom, JanSport, and Gildan.

I was thinking about these facts - which were detailed in a recent report put out by the London-based labor group No Sweat on one Honduran factory that produces shirts for half a dozen big labels - as I walked through the Maui County Store at the Maui Mall in Kahului a couple weeks ago.

There I found shelves lined with officially licensed t-shirts advertising the county police, fire and lifeguard departments, as well as the University of Hawaii. Usually costing $17.95, there are all kinds of shirts on display. On yellow one advertises the County of Maui Lifeguard Aquatics Division. Another black one, retailing for $19.95, says "Never Forget Hawaii Fire Department 9-11-01."

The shirt labels come from all the big manufacturers: Jansport, Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Gildan. They also say that the shirts were almost certainly made in sweatshops. The Fruit of the Loom shirts came from El Salvador. The Hanes and Gildan items came from Honduras. The Jansport tees hail from El Salvador and Madagascar.

This is actually quite common. Sweatshops pervade American life. Take away every stitch of sweatshop-produced clothing right now, and you're going to have a lot of naked people walking the streets. As I write these words, I'm wearing a Hanes Beefy T shirt made in Mexico and a pair of Old Navy cargo shorts made in Bangladesh. I doubt if any unionized hand touched them before they reached these shores.

The County of Maui, like most municipalities in the U.S., buys thousands of sweatshop-manufactured shirts, uniforms and other apparel every year. According to Greg King, who handles procurement for the County's Purchasing Division, all contracting policies are set by the state legislature. "We have to abide by their rules," he said.

The Maui County Store is slightly different entity.

"The Maui County Store is a joint project of the County of Maui's Business Resource Center and Maui Community College's Center for Entrepeneurship,” states the Store's website (www.mauicountystore.com). “The County Store serves a dual purpose of providing hands-on retail business training for students in the Center for Entrepreneurship programs, and serving as an outlet for County of Maui's civic and service associations and departments to sell their logo wear."

"We're a state institution," said Melissa Yoshioka, an MCC official who helps run the store. "We used reputable vendors. The state has a list of authorized and unauthorized vendors, and from there we use our best judgment."

Yoshioka said the Store doesn't consider an apparel company's labor conditions when buying clothing. In fact, no one at the county, college or state level contacted for this story had ever heard of factoring worker rights into procurement.

Of the labels I saw in the County Store, let's begin with Montreal-based Gildan Activewear, if for no other reason than that it recently admitted to contracting a viciously anti-union Honduran sweatshop employing 1,800 people to make some of its t-shirts.

"[A Fair Labor Association (FLA)] audit concluded that at our El Progreso factory there were restrictions on workers' rights to freedom of association," says an official Gildan statement posted on its website last month. "Gildan acknowledges these findings and takes them very seriously. Gildan accepts and is willing to adhere to the freedom of association standard in the FLA Workplace Code of Conduct in all of our operations."

Gildan does about $425 million in apparel sales every year. Rare amongst the big labels, the company has actually been a member of the watchdog FLA since November, 2003. The company agreed to issue the public statement cited above in exchange for not getting booting from the organization for its Honduran anti-union activities, which were detailed in a scathing July 29, 2004 Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) report.

WRC investigators conducted lengthy interviews with 37 current and former El Progreso workers. Gildan also denied them access to the plant. Among the complaints cited in the WRC report:

• "That mandatory work shifts are longer than the legal maximum and that overtime and work on rest days and holidays is not compensated in accordance with the law."

• "[T]hat workers who have been illegally fired have been harassed in their homes, post-dismissal, by Gildan staff and pressured to sign ‘voluntary' resignation letters."

• "That a large number of workers have been illegally dismissed over the last two years as a result of plant policy to eliminate all trade union activity at the factory." Though Gildan eventually admitted to the anti-union practices and agreed to rehire 39 of 100 or so workers it terminated, Gildan also closed the El Progreso factory in September, 2004. Gildan denied the closure - announced two weeks before the WRC report came out - had anything to do with the labor complaints, saying the plant was "uncompetitive."

WRC investigators also found Gildan's El Progreso factory "violated Honduran law" through a series of payment practices. Gildan denied it did anything wrong, saying the Honduran government authorized them to force employees to work 11-hour shifts without overtime, work on Sundays and holidays and to not pay workers for a legal 30-minute break during the day. Though the WRC found the Honduran government—not exactly the leading labor force in Central America - had improperly authorized Gildan to break workplace laws, Gildan only agreed to start paying workers during their lunch breaks.

The fact that we know so much about Gildan's sweatshop activities is unusual, and actually shows the labor progress the company is making. Gildan is far from a completely just employer, but labor activists admit that it's moving in that direction.

Similarly, JanSport - which makes shirts for countless universities across the country - has been disclosing its factories on its website (www.jansport.com) since 1999. That came about after college protests and boycotts brought the company bad publicity.

As for labels like Fruit of the Loom and Hanes, that's not so easy to determine. While labor activist Bjorn Claeson of the Bangor, Maine-based organization Sweat Free Communities says it's "likely" the factories contracted by those firms have "deplorable, sweatshop" conditions, it's impossible to say for certain. That's because the big apparel firms treat factory information as proprietary.

"They say at first that these are trade secrets," said Claeson. "But they're not—they source from the same factories as their competitors." Some companies like Fruit of the Loom say not to worry because they do everything themselves.

"As a vertically integrated manufacturer, we control the quality of our garments every step of the way," reads a Fruit of the Loom statement at its website. "[W]e manufacture our own yarn, knit the cloth, cut the fabric, sew the garments, and package the product ourselves."

A 2004 report on the Honduran AAA/Alejandro Apparel factory published by the London-based activist group No Sweat tells a different story. That report includes photos of Hanes, Nike, Fruit of the Loom, Gildan and Adidas t-shirt labels smuggled out by factory workers, showing that they made shirts for at least five different companies.

The report detailed how many plant workers suffered repetitive motion injuries and back pain, were ordered back to their work stations if they spent too much time in the restroom and having to listen to the plant owner say that if they dared unionize, he'd close the plant.

They earned just six cents for every shirt they made. That came out to about $1.11 an hour, $211.94 a month and $2,543.32 a year. When told that some say the cost of living in Honduras is pretty low and that wage should provide them with a good life, one worker told the report researchers that it was "impossible" to live on the wages they were making.

"You have already seen the conditions in which we live, right?" the worker said. "You have gone to our homes and seen the conditions, and there is the response: It is not true what they say."

Maui County, the State of Hawaii and MCC are all actually in a position to do some good. They're big customers-far bigger than you or I-and the apparel industry still functions on the old idea that the customer is always right.

Municipalities all over the country have begun taking this to heart, adopting "sweat-free" procurement policies. Basically, they're requirements that city, state or county purchasing divisions take into account labor conditions when accepting bids for uniforms and other apparel.

"If you have a policy like this, [apparel makers] have to disclose where [the clothing] was made," said Claeson. "It pushes responsibility to the apparel manufacturers. You have them going on record and consenting to independent monitoring."

So far the State of Maine, the City of Boston, the State of New Jersey - along with seven cities and eight counties-the City of Albuquerque, the City of New York, 20 New York school districts, the State of Pennsylvania, the State of California and the Cities of Toledo, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee have all adopted such policies. The City of Los Angeles adopted such a policy on Nov. 9 of this year.

"The Los Angeles law is the toughest in the country," said Erica Zeitlin of the group No More Sweatshops, which pushed for the bill for more than two years. "The point is to set up a model precedent for government contracts. Communities across the U.S. would pick up where we started."

The Los Angeles ordinance language is unequivocal, and recognizes the power that municipalities have as customers seeking products in the marketplace.

"[T]he City seeks to protect its interests by assuring that the integrity of the City's procurement process is not undermined by contractors who engage in sweatshop practices and other employment practices abhorrent to the City," states the ordinance.

"When the City inadvertently contracts with these contractors, the City's ethical contractors are placed at a distinct competitive disadvantage. Many times ethical contractors are underbid by unscrupulous contractors in competition for City contracts. These ethical contractors may be dissuaded from participating in future City procurement contracts."

According to a report filed by Los Angeles City Administrative Officer William T. Fujioka in advance of the Nov. 9 City Council meeting, the ordinance "requires contractors to sign a Contractor Code of Conduct affirming that they and their subcontractors will comply with all applicable workplace laws." Fujioka added that the contracts "would include commodities that have a high probability of being assembled or manufactured in sweatshop working conditions as reported by anti-sweatshop advocates."

The ordinance's Code of Conduct includes the requirement that the winning contractor pays its workers a living wage. The City will also form an "advisory working group" with labor groups and hire "an independent monitor to conduct on-site factory assessments."

So what about Hawaii? When asked about the possibility of Maui County or the State of Hawaii adopting such a policy, Greg King of the Maui County Purchasing Division said he'd "never" heard it discussed at the county or state level. That doesn't surprise Zeitlin. "The fact of the matter is that across the U.S. [contracting with sweatshop labels] is the norm," she said. "But this is the start of a stronger, more viable movement." MTW