Modern-day Slavery

     "The physical pain didn't last long, but the pain I feel in my heart will never disappear." (Boycott Nike) said a little five year old who manufactures Nike shoes in Vietnam. Many people do not realize that buying clothing from companies that use sweatshops put millions of small and innocent children through pain and suffering. Imagine slaving for 12 hours with a supervisor in an overly oppressive working environment. Now imagine being only 5 years old. This is the reality for over 200 million children (Boycott Nike). These children are forced to make clothing for long hours for as little as a few cents a week. They toil for long hours for a country all of the way around the world, for people who do not even realize how much work goes into the clothing they wear every day. Sadly, today the value of the dollar has become worth more than a human life. Many of America's favorite brand name clothing companies profit from the labor of innocent children and deny the existence of horrible sweatshops. Many corporate giants push innocent children into a life of poverty and oppression. People must be educated about slavery and sweatshops, and monstrous name brand companies, like Nike, need to be held accountable for their actions, and should be pushed to establish a safe and humane working environment.
     Most people do not realize that their clothing is manufactured in a sweatshop. Many people do not even realize that these sweatshops exist, and that there are sweatshops that still exist in the United States. When Americans think of slavery, they imagine the slaves of the Civil War, but slavery today has a different face. People need to be educated on the subject of modern-day slavery and sweatshops. According to Mr. Williams of Anti-Slaver.org, the definition of a slave is:

A slave is: forced to work -- through mental or physical threat; owned or controlled by an 'employer', usually through mental or physical abuse or threatened abuse; dehumanised, treated as a commodity or bought and sold as 'property'; physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement.

In elementary and middle school, children are educated about the civil war, which resulted from issues related to slavery. Children are led to believe that slavery ended along with the war, but slavery did not end in the 1800's. Today's slavery is seen in the eyes of innocent children who are shackled to machines, and forced to work twelve hours a day six days a week. Most of these children receive as little as five dollars a week, and sometimes work at gunpoint (Slavery in the Modern World). These children, in most cases, are also physically and mentally abused. In Haiti, for a small fee, a child slave, known as a restavik, can be taken to the police for a professional beating (Restevics: Child Slaves). In most cases these children do not return. In places like Bangladesh and Africa, children go out to the store, and never return. They are snatched up from the streets in their neighborhoods, transported to other countries, and shipped off to sweatshops all over the world.
     Slavery is illegal almost all over the world, but little is done about it. Many laws and anti-slavery groups try to combat slavery. The first step in combating slavery practices is for companies that perpetuate this revolting institution must take responsibility. A way that these companies could take responsibility is to establish a line of communication with the factory workers. The workers need to have a non-threatening method of letting the company know of inhumane labor practices within the sweatshops. The only way that most people have contact with the company is through Non-Governmental Organizations, and even then, the companies still ignore the major problems. The Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee for Change has been pushing Nike to improve labor practices and conditions in sweatshops that manufacture for them. At one point a factory in Hong Kong burned down, and Nike claimed that no one notified them. The whole time the HKICC was trying to provide for the workers, and have the factory rebuilt. Meanwhile, the workers were forced into a nearby dump. The HKICC finally got through to Nike, the rubble was cleaned away, and the factory was re-built (Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee for Change).
     Second, for the conditions to be improved, the minimum wage at the sweatshops must be raised. The sweatshops pay the workers so little money that it forces them way below the poverty level, so the companies that do business with them need to "agree to pay a living wage" (Stop Sweatshops). This is the biggest problem with sweatshops, workers being forced to work for little or nothing. Raising the minimum wage for sweatshops would solve many of their problems. In order for this change to happen, the government must get involved. The workers have no way of getting the minimum wage raised by themselves. Even in countries with a set minimum wage, like Haiti, workers are denied the minimum wage and sometimes even go unpaid. With government policies enforcing penalties for breaking the law, higher wages could become a possibility for child laborers.
     Third, the workers must have the right to organize into unions. With union assistance workers would be able to improve their working conditions and their wage on their own (Stop Sweatshops). In countries with the right to organize, that right is denied to sweatshop workers, and when they try to organize a union, the owners of the sweatshops brutally attack them. The factories must also explain what a union is, and that they have the right to organize, because in many of the factories where they have the right to organize, the workers either do not know what a union is, or are unaware that they exist. The workers should also have the right to choose the union that best fits their needs. In some countries, the sweatshop supervisors assign the workers to unions of the owner's choice.
     Fourth, companies must be held accountable for public disclosure of sweatshops. They need to disclose the location of all sweatshops. The practice of taking clothing that is made in US territories and slapping a "Made in America" label on it must stop (Stop Sweatshops). Very few companies admit to using sweatshops, and it is most likely that they are just hiding the location of their sweatshops. The ones not hidden from the public usually have much more sanitary and humane working conditions. The following chart demonstrates statistics of a factory with a disclosed location vs. one that is undisclosed:

Nike Sweatshop Statistics

	Disclosed	Undisclosed
Factory	Wei Li Cap Factory	Hung Wah and Hung Yip Garment factory
Gender Ratio	80-90% are women	Almost all workers are women
Age Range	16-25	16-32
Wage	$37-122	$49-85
Working Hours	12 hour shifts	12.5 hour shifts
Working Day	One day off every 12 working days Usually work six days a week, Sunday off	Seven days a week Can have their one day off a month, when they get paid
Catering & Accommodation	Workers think food is good, and prefer to eat in factory. Four dorms for women and one for men, 10 workers to a room	Workers do not like the factory food. 12 workers share a dorm and windows are barred. Seven rooms and three toilets on one floor
Insurance	Workers do not know that it exists	Not covered
Leisure activities	Basketball	NONE
Unions	There is one, but is selected by the management	NONE

(Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee for Change)

The disclosed factory allows almost all rights to the workers, and the undisclosed sweatshop has workers with no rights and inhumane conditions. These conditions must be improved, and companies, like Nike, need to take responsibility for living conditions of the sweatshop laborers who work for them. To make this happen, companies must disclose the location of the sweatshops they do business with so the workers can be monitored and receive the proper help.
     Improving labor and living conditions must become first priority, because closing down sweatshops does as much damage as not helping the workers at all. Reebok tried to close their factories, and the workers rioted in the streets in front of the office buildings until the factories were reopened. Even though the life of a sweatshop worker is undesirable, many have no choice, that may be their only way of making money in an overpopulated country. Workers must have safe working conditions and receive adequate compensation to support themselves and their families.
     In a personal interview Mr. Jeff Ballinger, who is an activist focusing on Nike factories in Indonesia, said,

The look is quite deceptive because the factories are clean and well-lit, not grimy and dark (as you would imagine a "sweatshop"). Workers complaints include forced overtime, verbal abuse by supervisors, low pay and very tough work quotas. When you walk through the factories, it seems the workers are afraid to look up from their machines. (Jeff Ballinger)

Workers should not have to dread going to work every day because they fear harassment by their supervisors. They should also get better pay, at least $1.00 for every hour that they work, and they should receive realistic quotas.
     Companies like Nike have conduct codes that define rights of the employees, and these codes need to be enforced. Mr. Ballinger elaborated Nike's conduct code;

Clean -- true... safe -- they were poisoning workers in Vietnam with a very toxic glue & had to admit to the New York Times' reporter several years ago that they knew about the problem for a long time and had not seriously addressed it. After the front-page story, of course, they fixed it. Are workers suffering from work-related stress? I think so. Nike's own report (Feb. 2001) shows that workers complained about being forced to work too fast. (Jeff Ballinger)

     Another thing that should be enforced by the companies is making sure workers receive better pay. In most countries sweatshop workers receive less money in one week than most Americans make in one hour for minimum wage, which keeps the workers and their families well below the poverty line. These statistics are shown on the following chart:

	Hourly	Daily (10 Hour Day)	Monthly (25 working days per month)
Canada	$5	$50	$1250.00
Haiti	$.218	$2.18	$54.00
China	$.136	$1.36	$34.00

(Stop Sweatshops)

Wage and compensation policies must be reformed. It does not actually take $100 to make a pair of shoes. When viewing the price makeup of a pair of $100 athletic shoes (see illustration below), one can see that while the retailers and other parties get 88% of the cost of the shoe, the manufacturers receive only 12%, of which only 2% is profit, while the individual employees receive only 0.4% of the end price of the shoes. To make matters worse, some of these manufacturers pay new employees an "apprentice wage" which is below the regular rate, claiming that the employees need several months to learn the job. In most cases, however, the employees receive a few hours of training, and then are put out on the assembly line, stitching together Nike's products right along with the rest of the employees. Thus the "apprentice wage" becomes another cost-cutting strategy for manufacturers (Sweatshops- A Menace to Society).

Fifty percent of a shoe's cost is store profit, while only .4% is spent on employees. Companies must protect their investment in human capital even if it means reducing their profit margins.
     Another reform issue is that the sweatshop workers receive unrealistic quotas. Usually when workers are not seen as meeting quotas, they are forced to work overtime, without extra pay. Claudia, a girl from a Polo sweatshop in Tehuc�n, Mexico remembers being in this situation, "Supervisors yelled at us and pressured us. Once a supervisor threw pants at me and yelled at me because the stitches weren't exactly the same on 30 pairs of pants. I had to redo these pants before I left as a punishment."(Stop Sweatshops) Unfair quotas, like the ones expected of Claudia, should not be allowed, the companies that do business with sweatshops need to also take control of this issue. They should either train the supervisors or send some of their own people to help supervise.
     Humans, specifically children, are the largest assets to companies dependent on mass production, and, therefore, should be protected. According to the Boycott Nike website, "More than 200 million children worldwide, some as young as 4 and 5 years old, are slaves to the production line"(Boycott Nike). Sadly, no companies have "stepped up to adopt the principles of the anti-sweatshop movement", with the exception of No Sweat Apparel (Stop Sweatshops). However, a long list of companies that do business with sweatshops includes:

Abercrombie & Fitch
Nike
The Gap
Wal-Mart
K-Mart
Tommy Hilfiger
Disney
Hanes

Some of the corporations that work with sweatshops also own other companies. For example, Gap also does business under the names Old Navy, Banana Republic, GapKids, and babyGap. Gap makes the biggest profit of all from sweatshops at $13.7 billion in 2000 (Stop Sweatshops).
     Safety is another priority for labor reform. All over the world children perform dangerous jobs like harvesting tobacco and cocoa (Free the Slaves). Activists have had some success in pressuring companies to reform. Mr. Ballinger publicly humiliated Nike on the front page of the New York Times to get Nike to make sure that the supervisors and sweatshop owners were no longer poisoning the workers. According to Mr. Ballinger it is not only the responsibility of the companies to help the sweatshop workers, he says, "richer nations must certainly be prodded to increase foreign aid." He also says that specifically, "Americans must take an interest in these daunting and often dangerous initiatives" (To Promote Democracy). Since many of the richer countries have clothing companies that use sweatshops, they should support the workers. Supporting them could be as simple as writing to the company or government official to try to get laws passed.
     Education about slavery and sweatshops is essential, and offending companies must be held accountable by providing a clean and safe working environment. Companies that use sweatshop must take responsibility for the sweatshops that manufacture for them. They should provide some support so the workers can support themselves and their families. The companies must also disclose the location of the sweatshops so the workers can get the proper assistance. The words from a slave in 1848, still apply to slaves in 2002:

"Am I not a man and brother?
Have I not a soul to save?
Oh, do not my spirit smother,
Making me a wretched slave;
God of mercy, God of mercy,
Let me fill a freeman's grave!"


--Am I Not a Brother?
By:William W. Brown
(William Wells Brown's Songbook)

Works Cited

Ballinger, Jeff. Interviewed September 19, 2002.
"Boycott Nike". http://www.saigon.com/~nike.
"Free the Slaves". http://www.freetheslaves.net.
"Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee for Change".
     http://www.cic.org.
"Stop Sweatshops: Curriculum"
     http://www.uniteunion.org/sweatshops/teach/curric.html.
"Sweatshops - A Menace to Society." Accessed October 10, 2002
     http://www.schuminweb.com/schumin-
     web/writings/college/sweatshops.htm