Today's Fashion Statement: 'No Sweat!'

Clothing for the Gap — and many other upscale American stores — is manufactured under brutal, sweatshop conditions. AFSCME members can do something about that.

By Susan Ellen Holleran

Would you spend an additional 64 cents for a $30 pair of slacks if doing so would provide a "basic needs wage" for the factory worker who produced them? According to Marymount University surveys, 86 percent of consumers would be willing to spend even more to ensure decent living conditions for those who make their clothes.

That 64 cents would help garment workers — mostly women — in Latin America, Africa and Asia provide their children with better food and clothing and a chance at a productive life.

None of us would deliberately support a sweatshop, no matter where it exists. We wouldn't subsidize factories that paid their employees less than a subsistence wage, worked them until they dropped, jeopardized their lives in case of fire by locking them in, restricted their bathroom breaks or physically attacked them when they organized to improve their conditions.

But that's exactly what we are doing when we buy an outfit at the Gap or the other clothing companies under the "Gap Inc." umbrella: GapKids, babyGap, Old Navy and Banana Republic. Gap Inc.'s total sales in 2000 amounted to $13.7 billion.

We're supporting the global sweatshop system by which those labels contract out the manufacture of their trendy clothes to some 2,000 factories in 60 of the world's poorest countries.

RACING TO THE BOTTOM. Huge clothing retailers like the Gap exercise tremendous power and demand very low production costs. Activists in the Global Justice for Garment Workers (GJGW) campaign call it "the race to the bottom" — pitting manufacturers in poor countries against each other in order to squeeze out the lowest bid.

It's precisely that kind of economic imperialism that UNITE, the garment workers' union, sought to combat when it pioneered anti-global sweatshop efforts in the mid-1990s. The union's GJGW campaign has become the focal point of those efforts, and during the holiday season, they have expanded to include another component: United Students Against Sweatshops, which has been targeting the various Gap operations.

UNITE sees a direct connection between foreign sweatshops and the American clothing and textile workers the union represents. "We're concerned about the flight of our industry overseas," says Patricia Westwater, UNITE's communications director. Since those overseas jobs exist, "We want wherever possible to raise the standards of the workers who do them."

WALK WHILE YOU TALK. Gap Inc. has often "talked the talk" — endorsing decent treatment for its garment workers — but it has failed to "walk the walk." For instance, it was one of the last retailers to join the settlement in the so-called Saipan Scam case.

The firm claims to conduct stringent monitoring of the plants with which it does business in El Salvador. Yet the Salvadoran government has identified major problems: bacteria-laden water, obligatory 12-hour shifts, mandatory pregnancy tests. Guatemala's Shin Won factory, a major supplier, is the Gap's model factory. But its employees — and a government investigation — tell of unpaid overtime, sexual harassment and physical abuse. In addition, earnings fall one-third below the poverty line. Workers live in nearby squatter colonias in corrugated metal shacks with no running water or electricity.

Those are the plants Gap Inc. brags about. So it's not difficult to imagine the conditions at the others, which are hidden in impoverished communities scattered across the globe.

BRINGING ACCOUNTABILITY. Think about it. The people who make our clothes overseas work hard every day. They should earn enough to provide for their families. They should not live in fear of being worked to exhaustion or being attacked by a supervisor or having to put their children on a production line at a tender age. We can prevent all that from happening.

What to do? Hold Gap Inc.'s family of retailers, and others that sell sweatshop-produced garments, accountable for the conditions under which their clothes are made. Ask store managers if they have a worldwide list of factories where the merchandise was produced and if they can guarantee that the workers involved were paid enough to support their families. When retailers are held up to public scrutiny, the pressure makes them reconsider their policies and practices. For more ideas and information, log on to the Web sites of UNITE. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, garment sweatshops flourished in the United States. Coalitions of workers and consumers joined together to improve working conditions. Their success made life better for hundreds of thousands of American workers. Our efforts will truly affect lives around the world.

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