Date of publication: April 15, 2006
Source: La Prensa de Minnesota
Author: Noah Seligman
The movement for worker's rights and upholding labor standards made a swing through one of the places it started over the weekend. From April 7th to April 9th, SweatFree Communities hosted its third annual international conference in Minneapolis.
SweatFree Communities was founded in 2002 by anti-sweatshop organizers in Maine, Minnesota, New York, Wisconsin and elsewhere. The original members had been working on separate local campaigns, so SweatFree was formed to create a structure to sharing resources and information. The national movement is dedicated to convincing school districts, cities, states, and other institutional purchasers to adopt “sweat-free” purchasing policies and stop tax dollars from subsidizing sweatshops.
Resource Center of the Americas was the local host, a nonprofit devoted to promoting human rights. Octavio Ruiz is the globalization coordinator for the Minnesota Fair Trade Coalition in the Resource Center of the Americas.
He said the sweat-free campaign started at the Resource Center five years ago. The effort pushed the city of Minneapolis to adopt a resolution stating that the city should purchase products and services that don’t have sweatshop conditions. The Minneapolis ordinance states that the city will take caution to only contract out apparel from factories that respect worker's rights.
Ruiz said the state of Minnesota really spearheaded the now nationwide effort against sweatshops. Currently, his organization is using high school students to talk to their school board about adopting sweat-free policies.
Liana Foxvog is a national organizer for SweatFree Communities, and she said 70 communities nationwide have sweatshop free policies as do over 150 universities. She also noted that SweatFree Communities is concerned about new anti-immigration measures being debated.
Ruiz said the anti-sweatshop campaign helps the Latino community who is disproportionately impacted by sweatshop labor.
"It's kind of an indirect action to the Latino community," he said. "A lot of people who migrate here work on the border in sweatshop conditions. A lot of us, including me worked a lot of us including me, worked with no benefits in sweatshop conditions."
According the US Department of Labor, a sweatshop is defined as any workplace that has multiple labor law violations at one time. This can include workers not being paid minimum wage, unsafe or unsanitary conditions or workers being fired for unionizing. A report from the year 2000 by the Labor Department indicated that there were 22,000 sweatshops in the United States, the vast majority located in Los Angeles or New York City.
Foxvog said the core message of the conference was to discuss the purchasing power of local and county government, a total that reaches an estimated $400 billion in consumer goods annually. She stressed the importance of spending that money that goes to institutions that are better for workers and have improved working conditions.
"Sweatshops are the norm of global production industry," she said. "We need to recognize that in many countries the problem is that we need to be telling corporations to respect worker rights, and respect laws that are on the books. There are many good labor laws and they need to be enforced."
The conference is used to connect people working globally together on worker's rights issues. There were people from nine different countries in attendance
Eric Dirnbach attended the conference as part of UNITE HERE, a labor union for 450,000 textile and apparel workers in the United States and Canada, and a founding member of SweatFree Communities.
He said the work done over the past few years is about educating city and states about resolutions. Dirnbach said situations vary depending on legislators and the strength of the local grassroots movement. He said that sweat-free policies have not led to concrete results in the factories, which brings in the second phase, actual enforcement and monitoring.
Dirnbach also said outsourcing has changed the equation for labor unions, with many jobs going oversees, especially to China, a country he said has some of the worst labor conditions. The new global economy means it's imperative that the worker's rights movement extend beyond the United State's borders.
"We need to protect (worker's) rights wherever they are," he said. "We want to work with immigrants anybody doing work in this industry who has an interest in improving conditions. Workers need to unite; it’s the only way to achieve what we’re calling a 'worker's rights' globalization."
The two new initiatives from SweatFree communities involve tapping in to set political connections. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome sent a letter to progressive mayors across the country to join in a consortium for sweatshop free purchasing. Maine Governor Democrat John Baldacci sent a letter in late February to every governor urging support for a similar consortium.