Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas

The Anti-Sweatshop Movement and the Struggle for Social Justice

Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135931711
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Challenging sweatshop labor practices is extremely difficult, but garment workers, labor unions, and non-government organizations from Central America and the United States have successfully mobilized for better wages and working conditions over the past ten years. Those gains have not been broadened or sustained over time, however. This book examines why these various outcomes occurred through a comprehensive analysis of four cross-border labor solidarity campaigns. It concludes with some short, medium, and long-term strategies for addressing and potentially overcoming some of the obstacles that the contemporary anti-sweatshop movement currently faces.

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Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas

The Struggle for Social Justice

The Dark, Satanic Mills of the Twenty-First Century

Every single day tens of thousands of people pour into clothing factories all over Central America. These workers—teenagers, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, grandparents, students, musicians, artists, and activists—often live in cramped, makeshift homes, with corrugated tin roofs, dirt floors, and little running water or electricity. They usually wake up before sunrise, get dressed quickly, and climb aboard old, overcrowded smoke-spewing yellow school buses. They know they must arrive on time; so many skip eating breakfast. Punctuality is crucial. Being one minute late can cost a worker one day’s pay.

Most factories resemble large warehouses. They are typically well fortified. Steel gates, security cameras, and barbed wire are commonplace. Armed guards search all workers and inspect their plastic identification cards before they enter the factory. Once inside, the noise can be deafening and the heat intolerable. Dust and lint fill the air. Safety equipment (e.g., masks, earplugs, etc.) is rarely provided. Bathroom breaks are usually timed and regulated; overtime, mandatory; and the work pace, relentless. Some workers sew, for instance, one hundred zippers on trendy, brand name jeans every single hour. Work shifts often range between ten and twelve hours, but they can last as long as fourteen or sixteen hours. Wages hover, depending on the country, around fifty cents an hour. Health care, sick pay, vacation time, and other related benefits are virtually nonexistent.

The wages and working conditions in these factories—known as maquiladoras in Central America—resemble William Blake’s nineteenth-century “dark, satanic mills.”¹ The garment and textile factories or “mills” of that era were usually called “sweatshops.” Contractors or “middlemen,” who received production orders from manufacturers, operated those shops. Their profits came from “sweating” their workers—mostly young women and children— through low wages, long hours, and poor working conditions.² The “sweating system” generated intense competition. Contractors and manufacturers constantly tried to keep production costs as low as possible, making everyday life intolerable inside and outside the factory.³

Garment workers did not meekly accept these conditions; they periodically resisted and demanded social change. In the United States, thousands of immigrant women shirtwaist workers organized a major strike, called the “Uprising of the 20,000,” in 1909.⁴ More strikes occurred over the next two years. In 1911, 146 garment workers died in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in New York City. Locked doors and faulty fire exits, combined with gross managerial and government negligence, left hundreds of workers trapped inside the ten-story building when the blaze first broke out. Firefighters reached the fast-moving inferno within minutes, but their ladders and water hoses were not long enough to reach the skyscraper’s top floors. Faced very few options, many workers leaped to their deaths or perished in the flames.⁵

This tragic incident generated tremendous outrage. Garment workers and consumers—mostly working- and middle-class women—organized themselves. They strengthened nascent labor unions and consumer leagues and labor unions and called for better wages and working conditions through ethical buying practices, government regulation, and collective bargaining.⁶ The historical “anti-sweatshop movement” of the early twentieth century struggled for years before garment workers and activists finally succeeded. The New Deal provided workers with basic labor standards (e.g., child labor, minimum wage, and overtime laws) and protected the right to organize. Through unionization and federal legislation, sweatshops essentially disappeared until the 1970s.⁷

The roll-back of the welfare state and the declining strength of the labor movement (among other factors) facilitated their resurgence.⁸ The return of the sweatshop went relatively unnoticed within popular and academic circles until two high-profile cases made the issue “front-page” news.⁹ In August 1995, federal and state labor investigators raided a barbed wire enclosed apartment building in El Monte, California, where they found seventy-two Thai workers. Armed security guards held them captive for as long as seven years, making them essentially “prisoners” or “slaves.” They worked “sixteen-hour days, seven days-a-week,” earning just about seventy cents an hour.¹⁰ Supervisors and guards verbally and sometimes physically abused them. Workers slept in overcrowded, unsanitary rooms. They could not make phone calls without proper authorization and were forced to buy high-priced goods from the company. The workers inside this shop produced clothes for well-known retailers like Mervyn’s, Miller’s Outpost, Montgomery Ward, Nordstrom, Robinsons May, Sears, and Target.¹¹

The Thai slavery case, like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire eighty years before, created intense controversy. The public was shocked. Most people assumed that sweatshops had been permanently abolished. Less than a year later, celebrity talk-show host Kathie Lee Gifford broke down and cried on national television after labor rights activists discovered that her Wal-Mart clothing line was made with child and sweatshop labor in Central America and the United States. Gifford’s tearful and angry outburst (she initially denied all charges of wrong-doing) sullied her clean-cut, All-American image, making her the symbolic “poster-child” of the anti-sweatshop movement.¹²

The extensive publicity surrounding these two events made the word “sweat-shop” a household item. Through comic strips (Doonesbury), films (The Big One), televisions programs (60 Minutes, Hard Copy, Beverley Hills 90210, ER), newspapers (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times) and other mass media and popular culture outlets, the public learned that not only had sweatshops “returned,” but now they were a global reality.¹³ Most clothing and apparel products were produced in the United States before the 1970s. That is no longer the case today. The garment industry is the most globalized industry in the entire world. Shoes, shirts, socks, pants, and underwear are made in well over one hundred different countries.¹⁴ Almost every single major label—Nike, Reebok, Liz Claiborne, Levi’s, Bugle Boy, Tommy Hilfiger, Guess, Phillips Van-Heusen, Fruit of the Loom, Maidenform—is produced off-shore. Retailers like Wal-Mart, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Target, Kohl’s, Sears, and the Gap also make their own “private labels” abroad.

Many politicians, corporate executives, and academics have praised this “global shift” for generating economic growth and creating sorely needed jobs within the developing world.¹⁵ Social justice activists often acknowledge (albeit tepidly) these claims, but they also emphasize the low wages and poor working conditions within these “dark, satanic mills” of the twenty-first century have generated discontent, especially in Central America.¹⁶ Garment workers there have slowed down production, organized strikes, and established community-based organizations and labor unions.¹⁷ These strategies have prompted mass firings, death threats, beatings, arrests, and other forms of intimidation. Many factories have also simply closed down and moved someplace else when faced with union organizing drives.¹⁸

These repressive activities—combined with the El Monte and Kathie Lee Gifford cases—sparked the growth of the “contemporary” anti-sweatshop movement in the middle and late 1990s.¹⁹ Like its historical predecessor, this social movement involves garment workers, labor unions, and consumer, faith-based, student, and women’s groups, but it also includes a wide variety of “non-government organizations” (NGOs).²⁰ The Campaign for Labor Rights (CLR), the National Labor Committee (NLC), the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), the United States/Labor Education in the Americas Project (U.S./LEAP), the Union of Needletrades, Industrial, and Textile Employees (UNITE), and Witness for Peace (WFP) are some of the key NGOs leading the U.S. side of this movement.²¹ All have worked extensively with Central American garment workers to confront sweatshop labor practices, passing out leaflets, writing letters, organizing rallies and teach-ins, holding press conferences, and providing resources (both financial and technical) for labor and community-based organizing campaigns.²² These strategies are designed to persuade garment companies to take responsibility for improving wages and working conditions in overseas, as well as domestic, sweatshops.

Researchers have increasingly studied these “cross-border” or “transnational” labor solidarity campaigns over the past decade.²³ Some cases have produced positive results, but these gains have not been usually sustained over time. Garment factories that improved wages and working conditions later shut down or fired union leaders and workers, for example. What factors explain these disparate outcomes? Why do most cross-border labor solidarity campaigns typically “succeed” in the short-run, but “fail” in the long-run? How can garment workers and their transnational allies fight back more effectively and obtain better wages and working conditions today? Is “social change” or “agency” possible in a globalized, corporate-driven world? Can the world economy be organized in a manner where “people come before profit?”²⁴

This book examines these key questions through four case studies that primarily involved Central American and U.S.-based labor unions and NGOs. These campaigns were selected because Central America (more specifically, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras) became a central site for garment production, labor organizing, and anti-sweatshop activity in the middle and late 1990s. In fact, one could argue that the contemporary anti-sweatshop movement “took off” in Central America.

After civil wars and human rights violations subsided in the late 1980s and early 1990s, regional apparel exports into the U.S. market soared.²⁵ As employment expanded, labor unrest grew. Garment workers and U.S. labor unions and NGOs eventually joined forces, creating “transnational activist networks” that challenged some of the most powerful companies in the world.²⁶ While similar campaigns took place elsewhere, these cases gained greater publicity and produced outcomes that paradoxically contradicted and confirmed popular assumptions about globalization and transnational social movements.²⁷ These campaigns, for instance, showed garment workers, acting independently, as well as collaboratively with their cross-border allies, could successfully target highly-mobile garment firms and enhance their wages and working conditions, but these gains were often ephemeral.²⁸ These striking, but sobering, results have far-reaching theoretical and political implications (which will be discussed in chapter 6) for academics, activists, and the broader public.

Despite the burgeoning literature on globalization, sweatshops, and cross-border labor solidarity, no one single volume has systematically and comparatively examined these four cases—Phillips Van-Heusen (Guatemala); Mandarin International (El Salvador); Kimi (Honduras); and Chentex (Nicaragua).²⁹ This book seeks to fill that missing gap. Based on ten years of extensive research, conducting scores of interviews with garment workers, social justice activists, and scholars, collecting primary and secondary sources (e.g., reports, flyers, contracts, etc.), and observing and participating in anti-sweatshop actions, I complied in-depth campaign chronologies, documenting each case’s twists and turns. I also examined their overall trajectories and various outcomes.

During this lengthy, but ultimately rewarding process, I discovered that cross-border labor solidarity is no easy task. There are numerous barriers and obstacles that must be negotiated and addressed. The “borders” of race, class, gender, geography, and language, as well as the role of the state, can affect a campaign’s direction and impact. No one single factor has more importance than the other. That being said, one of the most formidable challenges that garment workers, labor unions, and NGOs face today is the structure of the garment industry itself.

This chapter examines the relationship between the industry’s dynamics, globalization, and cross-border labor solidarity. An analysis of cross-border labor solidarity strategies that have been used within the anti-sweatshop movement follows this section. The chapter concludes with a historical and theoretical discussion of cross-border labor solidarity, while making reference to a key campaign victory in Mexico.

The Pyramid of Power

The garment industry is organized like a pyramid (see Figure 1.1).³⁰ Retailers occupy the top slot. They sell clothing and apparel products to consumers. In the 1980s and 1990s, the retail industry became increasingly concentrated through mergers, buy-outs, and takeovers.³¹ Discount and department store chains like Wal-Mart, Kmart, Sears, and Dayton-Hudson (owner of Target and Mervyn’s) became the largest and most powerful firms within the industry. In 2002, Wal-Mart’s total sales were $245 billion.³² The combined total sales of the next three companies, Sears, Kmart, and Dayton-Hudson, topped $125 billion for that same year.³³ These figures indicate that Wal-Mart dominates the “inner circle” of the retail market.

Indeed, Wal-Mart has become so large that its presence can be felt all over the world. This one-time “small-town, five-and-dime store” has grown into a corporate behemoth over the past twenty years, sparking intense controversy based on its size, scale, and relentless drive for lower-priced goods. The Arkansas-based company, which built its reputation on economic nationalism and the “Made in the U.S.A.” label, currently has ties with ten thousand suppliers all over the world. With this many contractors, Wal-Mart can literally pit “vendor against vendor, country against country.” Persistent demand for lower prices and/or higher quality has left factory owners with few alternatives; many report that they cannot cut costs any lower—they have “reached their limits.”³⁴

Source: adapted from Sweatshop Watch, 2003

Fig. 1.1 The Structure of the Garment Industry.

Garment workers like Isabel Reyes understand this reality all too well. This thirty-seven year old Honduran woman sews sleeves onto 1,200 shirts every single day. She works ten-hour days and earns $35 a week. The polo shirts that she makes sell for $8.63 at Wal-Mart. Even though prices and wages are extremely low, company representatives state they would like to reduce production costs by 20 percent. To accomplish that goal, the retailer will more than likely expand its ever-increasing links with Chinese-based suppliers, leaving Isabel Reyes and thousands more unemployed.³⁵

Manufacturers come next on the pyramid. These companies, despite their name, do not actually “manufacture” clothing. They design clothes that carry their la...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Americas
• 2 Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity in the Guatemalan Maquiladora Industry
• 3 The Salvadoran Maquiladora Industry and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity
• 4 The Honduran Maquiladora Industry and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity
• 5 Ni Un Paso Atrás! Not One Step Back!
• 6 Globalization and Cross-Border Labor Solidarity
• Appendix A
• Notes
• Bibliography