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10. Abused workers around the world make
Wal-Mart products.
Would you tolerate 24-hour work shifts,
9 cents an hour pay?
by ED FINKELSTEIN, Labor Tribune
May 5, 2005
(Reprinted with permission.)
What the labor movement fought to end at the turn of the last century in America — the equivalent of slave labor in sweatshops, unsanitary and often dangerous working conditions, long hours, child labor low pay and no benefits — has raised its ugly head again.
This is thanks to the greed of Wal-Mart and our fellow Americans who are willing to park their consciences at the stores’ doors in order to save a few bucks.
“I wonder — if it was their son or daughter or family member working under the conditions in Wal-Mart’s foreign factories — would Americans continue to flock to Wal-Mart?” asked Jim Dougherty, president of Local 655, the neighborhood union affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
“Wal-Mart’s alleged ‘low prices’ come at a very steep human price on children and adults alike,” Dougherty said. “I wonder if Americans would continue to shop at Wal-Mart if they realized the working conditions that people are forced to endure in factories that manufacture Wal-Mart products overseas?”
The Labor Tribune has compiled a startling picture of Wal-Mart’s overseas operations as part of a continuing series to explain how and why Wal-Mart has become the wealthiest, most-profitable and most-unconscionable company in the world, bigger than General Motors, ExxonMobil and General Electric, all icons of American industry.
The latter three provide decent wages, benefits and working conditions for their workers. Wal-Mart does not.
RACE TO THE BOTTOM
Wal-Mart has become a predominant, if not pre-eminent, force in the world’s most-underdeveloped nations. The consulting firm Retail Forward estimated in 2003 that Wal-Mart imported 50 to 60 percent of its merchandise.
“Wal-Mart is in the driver’s seat in the global race to the bottom, suppressing wages levels, workplace protections and labor laws,” said U.S. Rep. George Miller (D- Calif.), who has done extensive research on the company. “There is no question that Wal-Mart imposes a huge, often hidden, cost on its workers, our communities and U.S. taxpayers.”
Business Week reported that in 2002, Wal-Mart imported $12 billion worth of goods from China alone, which represented 10 percent of all U.S. imports from that country.
In 2004, Wal-Mart’s web site boasted that its Chinese imports increased to $18 billion, a 50 percent increase. Internationally, Wal-Mart is the largest importer of Chinese goods.
Fast Company magazine, in a December 2003 story entitled, “The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know,” said flatly: “There is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to ‘Buy American,’ has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone ...”
SWEATSHOP CONDITIONS
And how does Wal-Mart earn its profits? On the backs of foreign workers — men, women and children.
Here are only a few of their stories, based on articles printed around the globe:
- 9 cents an hour: "Bangladesh workers earn as little as 9 cents an hour making shirts for Wal-Mart,” reported USA Today.
- 20-hour shifts or fired: The Kathie Lee clothing label (made for Wal-Mart by Caribbean Apparel in Santa Ana, El Salvador) uses sweatshop conditions and forced overtime.
It is common for the cutting and packing departments to work 20-hour shifts, from 6:50 a.m. to 3 a.m.
Anyone unable or refusing to work the overtime hours will be suspended and fined and — upon repeat "offenses" — will be fired. This factory is in an American Free Trade Zone, says The National Labor Committee.
- Locked bathrooms: The same National Labor Committee reported, “Some of the abuses in foreign factories that produce goods for Wal-Mart include: Forced overtime, locked bathrooms, starvation wages, pregnancy tests, denial of access to health care, and workers fired and blacklisted if they try to defend their rights.
- Workers have no options: Thanks to a ban on independent trade unions and a lack of other basic human rights, China offers Wal-Mart a highly-disciplined and cheap workforce. A Chinese labor official who asked to remain anonymous for fear of punishment told the Washington Post, “Wal-Mart pressures the factory to cut its price, and the factory responds with longer hours or lower pay. And the workers have no options.”
- No salary boost in four years: One employee of a Chinese supplier described the difficulties of surviving on $75 per month. She could rarely afford to buy meat, and her family largely subsisted on vegetables. Over four years, she had not received a single salary increase, reported the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce.
24-HOUR SURVEILLANCE
The National Labor Committee also reports that in Wal-Mart’s China factories:
Clothing is usually sewn by young women, 17 to 25 years old (at 25, they are fired as ‘too old’). They are forced to work seven days a week, often past midnight for 12 to 28 cents an hour, with no benefits.
Women are housed in crowded, dirty dormitories, 15 to a room, and fed a thin rice gruel.
Workers are kept under 24-hour-a-day surveillance and can be fired for even discussing factory conditions.
The factories in China operate under a veil of secrecy, behind locked metal gates, with no factory names posted and no visitors allowed.
China’s authorities do not allow independent religious, human-rights or women’s groups to exist, and all attempts to form independent unions have been crushed.
PREGNANT MUST QUIT
In Bangladesh garment factories, where Wal-Mart clothes are manufactured, an estimated 90 percent of the more than 3,780 export garment factories violate women's legal right to three months’ maternity leave with full pay.
Some companies harass and pressure the pregnant women to quit. Others give the leave but will only take the women back as new employees. Only a handful of companies pay the benefits. The vast majority of factories simply cheat the women, The National Labor Committee reported.
- 24-hour shifts: In Honduras, where Wal-Mart clothes are sewn, there are mandatory 24-hour shifts. If workers do not stay, they are fired; pay is 43 cents an hour.
- Two sets of books to hide abuses: Sayeeda Roxana Khan, another former Dhaka, Bangladesh, factory manger, said that to fill orders on short schedules, factories often force their employees to work overtime or stay on the job for weeks without a day off. To conceal such practices, some factories keep two sets of books.
- Continuous work weeks: Khadija Akhter, 22-year old worker who performed final checks on men’s shirts and trousers in a Dhaka factory, said employees often worked from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. for 10-15 days at a stretch to fill big orders from Wal-Mart. Exhausted, she quit after a year and took a lower-paying but less-grueling job.
EIGHT TO A ROOM
$1.81-a-day pay: At the Gladpeer Garment Factory in Dongguan, China, 1,200 workers, mostly young women, are paid about $55 a month (or $1.81 a day) and live in cramped dormitories, eight to a room.
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TWO SHIRTS A MINUTE
Isabel Reyes worked in the Cosmos clothing factory in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for 11 years.
She sews sleeves onto shirts at a rate of 1,200 a day, or two shirts a minute, or one sleeve every 15 seconds. She earns $35 a week.
She says she can’t lift a cooking post or hold her infant daughter without the anti-inflammatory pills she gulps down every few hours. “The goals are always increasing, the pay stays the same,” she said.
Wal-Mart is the Cosmos factory’s main customer. While Wal-Mart says it does not tolerate child labor or forced or prison labor, the company refuses to reveal its Chinese contractors and it will not allow independent, unannounced inspections of its contractors’ facilities.
“Wal-Mart has such a strong command over the retail market that it alone affects the wages of many workers and the fate of many factories around the world,” the Los Angeles Times reported in a recent series about Wal-Mart and its abuses.
The series described how Wal-Mart's demands dictate lower wages, harder work and longer hours while eliminating jobs in factories across the globe — from Honduras to China.
“No longer is this humongous corporation putting only America's factories out of business, it has now turned to pitting factories in countries around the world against each other in an impossible race to the bottom,” the Times said.
NO WAL-MART STOCK
Providing witness to Wal-Mart’s terrible corporate approach to business, KLD & Co., a firm that provides social research for institutional investors, removed Wal-Mart from its Domini 400 Social Index (The Domini 400 is a benchmark index for measuring the effect of social screening on financial performance) two years ago.
Why this drastic measure? In a news release on the removal, KLD & Co. said it acted because:
- “Sweatshop conditions” existed at Wal-Mart’s overseas vendors’ factories.
- Wal-Mart hasn’t done enough to ensure that its vendors meet “adequate labor and human rights standards.”
- Wal-Mart hasn’t been forthright about its involvement with a Chinese handbag manufacturer alleged to have subjected workers to 90-hour weeks, exceptionally-low wages and prison-like conditions.
Newspaper columnist Harold Meyerson, editor-at-large for The American Prospect in the Washington Post, said it best:
“No other American company has done as much to destroy what's left of the U.S. clothing and textile industry or been so loyal a friend to the dankest sweatshops of the developing world.”
FEDERAL OVERSIGHT?
One would think that with all Wal-Mart’s abuses, well-documented in the press for at least a decade, the U.S. government would step in to stop the abuse.
“Wal-Mart is undercutting labor standards at home and abroad, while those federal officials charged with protecting labor standards have been largely indifferent,” said a damaging report on the government’s lack on intervention published last year by the U. S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce.
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