Creating a Sweatfree World Wal-Mart Campaign
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Group focuses on working conditions
Kalamazoo Gazette
April 17, 2008
» Go to http://www.mlive.com/news/kzgazette/index.ssf?/base/news-28/120853020632870.xml&coll=7
BY CHRIS KILLIAN
Special to the Gazette
OSHTEMO TOWNSHIP -- The glass doors to the Wal-Mart Supercenter's sprawling food section slide open and Didier Leiton steps inside.
The Costa Rica native doesn't do his food shopping in places nearly so massive, yet in a way, he is intimately familiar with some of the produce before him at the Ninth Street store near Kalamazoo.
A pile of pineapples is stacked in front of him, for $2.98 each. He grabs one with his left hand and reads the label.
``Dole,'' Leiton says in a thick Spanish accent.
``I've picked these before,'' he says through his translator. ``I've been in those plantations.''
For years, Leiton has worked in pineapple and banana plantations in Costa Rica. A pesticide he has sprayed on the fruit has made him and many others sterile, caused birth defects in many children in his extended family and contaminated rivers and well water, he claims.
Leiton approaches a woman who has picked up a container containing a pineapple core, with a label: ``Product of Costa Rica.'' Through his translator, he asks if she is aware of the working conditions for those who pick the pineapples.
``No,'' she responds.
``Then I want to tell you something,'' Leiton says.
He talks to her about conditions he has endured working 12- to 15-hour days, six or seven days per week, for $5 a day. He mentions scars the plantations have left on his country through clear-cutting forests.
``I'm not asking you not to buy that,'' Leiton tells the woman. ``But if you think the working conditions of those who picked that pineapple should be better, I want you to let Wal-Mart know that.''
The Kalamazoo woman, who asked that her name not be used for this story, puts the container back. ``I don't want it anymore,'' she tells Leiton. ``I thought these were grown in Hawaii. I had no idea of the things you just told me.''
Leiton, Jimenez and Trina Tocco, a Western Michigan University alumna and organizer with the International Labor Rights Forum, who organized the trip to Wal-Mart on Thursday, head toward the women's clothing section.
They meet-up with Victoria Kaplan, of SweatFree Communities, a group that advocates against sweatshops, and Savan Phal, a Cambodian woman who has made clothing for a supplier to Wal-Mart.
For the past two weeks, the group has been traveling to Wal-Mart stores in Michigan and Ohio to tell their stories to customers.
Phal holds a pink, collared, short-sleeved shirt listed at $8.84. She's worked on this exact style of shirt before, in a cramped, hot factory in the Cambodian capitol city of Phnom Penh.
She made 2 cents for every 12 tasks she performed, such as attaching the size tag or stitching the collar to the shirt, she said through her translator. She averaged making $1.50 per day and only once in the past year made more than $50 in a month, regularly working 14-hour days, she said.
Her translator approaches two women looking at a shirt made in Cambodia and explains how it was made. A Bloomingdale woman who asked that her name not be used, seems moved.
``I've seen pictures of groups of workers in other countries sewing, just hundreds of them in a room, and they're getting nothing,'' she said. ``It's just horrible.''
The products Leiton, Phal and workers like them have harvested or made are sold in many stores.
``Wal-Mart is the biggest corporation in the world and therefore has the most responsibility to ensure that the workers who provide their products are being treated and paid fairly,'' Tocco said of the focus on the retailing giant. ``They need to be the leader.''
A statement from Wal-Mart's senior manager for corporate communications, Sharon Weber, said: ``Wal-Mart does not tolerate sweatshop conditions in any of our suppliers' factories. To ensure this, we ask each supplier to sign a Code of Conduct which requires suppliers to comply will all local laws and practices, and prohibits the use of child labor or forced/prison labor.
``The code additionally protects the right for freedom of association and collective bargaining, and requires suppliers to have a safe work environment.''
At the Oshtemo Township Wal-Mart on Thursday, Leiton, still holding the pineapple, enters a checkout lane, hands the clerk a crumpled $5 bill, then explains to her why he is buying the pineapple and tells her his story.
``Well, thank you. ... I appreciate knowing that,'' the clerk says.
The group asks to see a store manager, who is handed a card urging Wal-Mart to pay a living wage, support anti-discrimination practices, initiate grassroots monitoring of factories and allow workers to freely associate. ``You'll have to mail this to the home office,'' the manager responds.
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