Written Off - Fighting Back

By Bjorn Skorpen Claeson

My name is Maryann. I set pockets at Tama. I have been a union member for 28 years.

My name is Carol. I set buttons at Maria Rose. I have been a union member for 46 years.

My name is Ron. I am a packer and shipper at A&H Sportswear. I have been a union member for 25 years.

Between them they have centuries of experience - 476 years to be exact - in the union movement and the apparel factories of eastern Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley: 16 workers from five factories still standing, gathered to discuss a new idea for saving their jobs, their garment industry, a whole tradition really, and a part of their identity.

We got together for dinner and roundtable discussion at a motel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania – a town perhaps best known for its now dead steel mill – to talk about how to put an end to public subsidies for sweatshops: as large consumers of uniforms and other products made by workers who must endure poverty wages, forced overtime, and dangerous working conditions, our states and local governments do, in effect, use our tax dollars to subsidize human rights abuses that give many unscrupulous apparel companies a competitive edge. Public purchases conducted with a blind eye to the conditions in which the products are made keep sweatshop abuse hidden in the dark and hurts the eastern Pennsylvania apparel workers. Workers everywhere lose. Small businesses and manufacturers who try to do right lose. The only winners are the transnational apparel companies who outsource even the responsibility for fairness and decency and externalize the social costs of production to workers, their families, and communities.

The UNITE HERE workers in eastern Pennsylvania were among the pioneers in the sweatfree movement some six, seven years ago, campaigning successfully for the nearby City of Allentown and County of Northampton to commit to sweatshop-free purchasing, and then working for many years to persuade the State of Pennsylvania to do the same. The idea was simple. If states and local governments send a clear message to vendors that sweatshop goods are unacceptable, the factories in eastern Pennsylvania would at least have a fighting chance for a sizable market. Companies that had relied on sweatshop labor to gain market advantage would instead have to work to improve conditions in their supplier factories to gain access to the new ethical government purchasing markets. High-road competition would benefit workers everywhere, leading to working conditions that spiral up rather than plummet down.

But years later the apparel workers in Lehigh Valley recognize that not even the state sweatfree procurement policy that Governor Rendell finally put in place through executive order two years ago has made much difference in their lives. It is safe to say it has not had much direct impact on workers elsewhere either. The problem here, as in most sweatfree cities and states, is lack of effective enforcement. How, really, can a city know if it is procuring sweatfree goods?

At the roundtable discussion the workers reflect on the precariousness of their work and lives. "The problem," Maryanne leads off, "is that nobody knows how to sew anymore. The younger kids only want to do computer work. They don’t want to work in the apparel factories." In fact, at the time of the meeting one of the factories desperately needed 20 extra workers, but could not find them anywhere.

"People feel like it is dieing," Ron offers. "One kid came into work for an hour and a half. Then she walked out and said, 'This isn't for me.'"

Gail, the UNITE HERE union official, recounts a meeting with a high-ranking state official who looked at her incredulously saying, "There are still apparel workers in Pennsylvania? Show me where they are."

Well, there are still about one thousand unionized apparel workers in the Lehigh Valley alone. They make swim suits, women’s and men’s dress clothing, uniforms for parochial and private schools, U.S. Postal Office uniforms, baseball jerseys (the ones sold at major league stadiums), and a variety of products for the military. The apparel industry here started as run-away shops from the unions in New York City in the 1930s. The union followed, organized the workers, and until recently there were over 20,000 unionized apparel workers in the area. Corporate globalization freed the companies to look further a field, scouring the globe for the cheapest and most vulnerable workforce they could find, and brought a new era of plant closings and run-away shops that all but eradicated the garment industry in eastern Pennsylvania.

But what is this thing, "corporate globalization"? In the first place, it is not a thing at all. Many of us believe that garment workers of eastern Pennsylvania are simply victims of globalization, an inexorable force sweeping across the globe like some sort of natural phenomenon - or disaster perhaps - nobody can control. Some people, the story goes, just do not have a place in the new global economic world order. U.S. apparel workers are a prime example of those discarded in this story, though, in many other versions of the story, plenty of others thus far more fortunate U.S. workers and even professionals worry that their time may soon be up as well, to say nothing of the majority of poor people around the world that globalization supposedly has made dispensable. Sweatshops, too, are akin to natural phenomena in this globalization story, a natural stage of economic development leading, by-and-by, to better times if only we leave the market forces to do their thing.

In fact, there is nothing natural or super-human about globalization. Our global economy is the direct result of specific choices made by some of the most powerful people on earth in the interest of the largest corporations we have ever seen. That is why I prefer the term "corporate globalization" over just "globalization"– human beings have, after all, traded with one another over remarkable distances for thousands of years, and people - working people that is - have often been freer to move about and cross borders than they are today. Today's globalization is the deliberate result of very detailed rules, authored by select people, for the movement of goods and capital, the terms of foreign investments, the protection of copy-rights and patents, and much more. The rules are very weak on labor standards and weaker yet on enforcement of those standards. The rules also tell us that a shirt is a shirt is a shirt, and no matter what the conditions in which they are made, governments may not discriminate between them. A shirt made in sweatshop conditions and another made in conditions of justice, it is all the same.

But globalization is not just a set of human-made economic rules; it is also our jumble of feelings and thoughts about who we are and how we and our jobs fit or do not fit into this world, a sense of the future we and our children can expect. Workers’ feeling that the apparel industry in eastern Pennsylvania is dieing, that there is no future in this kind of work anymore - that is as much a part of corporate globalization as the trade rules written in Geneva. Worker despair and hopelessness are a deliberate subtext of trade treatises; our feeling of powerlessness is as important as are tariffs and quotas in keeping the corporate economy of rising stock values and soaring deficits humming along. Anytime apparel workers say, "I have a sense of dignity - I am a human being!" they are part of the resistance movement. Anytime Pennsylvania garment workers dare to believe in their industry, to have hope, to feel that they can take action for change, they are also resisting corporate globalization.

Almost two-hundred years ago, in a different global economy, American manufacturing was also supposed to be dead. In 1820, Representative Henry Clay testified in Congress about the ghosts of once prosperous U.S. factories that had fallen victim to "foreign competition." Four years earlier, the British politician Henry Brougham had argued in Parliament that U.S. manufacturing was "contrary to the natural course of things" and that it was "well worth while to incur a loss upon the first exportation, in order, by the glut, to stifle in the cradle, those rising manufacturers in the United States…"

Brougham notwithstanding there was nothing natural about the ghost factories Clay observed. Instead, they were the result of a deliberate British economic strategy (foreshadowing Wal-Mart's strategy to squelch small business competition) that only happened to work for so long. Nor is there anything natural or pre-ordained about boarded-up factories and laid-off workers today, or about inhumane working conditions which again have become the norm for workers in the global apparel industry, the United States included. If the trade rules instruct governments to turn a blind eye to working conditions, well then it is no wonder the global economy has turned into a race to the bottom.

SweatFree Communities, the organization I represented at the Bethlehem meeting, is committed to the idea that states and local governments together have the kind of market power that can change the rules of the game for global apparel companies and other sweatshop industries. Together, cities and states purchase an estimated $400 billion of goods and services each year; even the small fraction that goes to apparel represents considerable power. Allentown or even the State of Pennsylvania will not make much of a difference on its own and does not have the resources to investigate working conditions of supplier factories. However, a consortium of cities, states, and other public purchasers committed to sweatfree procurement can make a difference by pooling resources for investigating factories in response to human rights alerts, and consolidating orders with sweatfree factories where workers have dignity, a respected voice, and are organizing for better conditions. This idea - to create a State and Local Government Sweatfree Consortium - is what we were discussing in Bethlehem.

About an hour into the conversation in Bethlehem, Gail, the UNITE HERE union official, asks, "Is the garment industry worth trying to save?" After a brief silence, heads nod and more and more people offer "yes," some tentative, some quite firm. One speaks up: "We’ve got to try. We can’t give up. People may feel this is real. Think about the money, how your tax dollars are spent. It’s a possibility for our people."

We hope it is a possibility for working people everywhere.

To learn more about the campaign for a State and Local Government Sweatfree Consortium, please visit www.sweatfree.org.

September 12, 2006