Working In These Times
Huge Anti-Sweatshop Victory for Activists—And Hondurans
United Students Against Sweatshops members protest the actions of Russell Athletics in Honduras, where the company closed a factory employing 1,200 people after they unionized. (Photo Courtesy of United Students Against Sweatshops )
Honduras hasn't exactly been full of good news since June, when President Mel Zelaya was ousted from power and ushered abroad, throwing the country into political chaos.
But a huge victory was scored yesterday for 1,200 workers in the country who were fired by Russell Athletics early this year after unionizing. The apparel company, which has fought off unions for years, shut down the factory.
But soon the workers will be back to work at a new plant. Better yet, Russell has pledged not to fight the organizing efforts of employees at its seven existing factories in Honduras—a major victory for the U.S. anti-sweatshop student movement, which has been fiercely and creatively pressuring Russell to reverse its anti-union stance since the factory closed in January.
As the New York Times' Steven Greenhouse reported today:
... [United Students Against Sweatshops] orchestrated a nationwide campaign against the company. Most important, the coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops, persuaded the administrations of Boston College, Columbia, Harvard, New York University, Stanford, Michigan, North Carolina and 89 other colleges and universities to sever or suspend their licensing agreements with Russell. The agreements — some yielding more than $1 million in sales — allowed Russell to put university logos on T-shirts, sweatshirts and fleeces.
Calling Russell's decision "landmark," United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) said in a statement today that "[t]his...is one of the most significant campaign victories of the global justice movement. No one has ever forced a multinational corporation to reopen a facility it shut down in the global race to the bottom."
Russell's decision to rehire the workers and make peace with unionists can be seen as the result of a decade of steady movement-building and coalition-building by student activists across the country. They pressured Russell's bottom line by convincing university administration's to adopt "codes of conduct" for the factory used by apparel companies.
And they went farther, as the Times reports, persuading school officials to create in 2000 the independent monitoring group Worker Rights Consortium, which inspects factories to enforce the labor codes. 170 universities are members of the organization, which wrote a report accusing Russell of violating workers' rights.
“This is a landmark event in the history of workers’ rights and the codes of conduct that we expect our licensees to follow,” said Mike Powers, a Cornell official who sits on the consortium, the Times reported. “My hat is off to Russell.”
Although it's unclear why the company conceded to activists' and workers' demands when it did—about ten months after USAS began its campaign—students' efforts were clearly behind the decision. College apparel is a significant market for Russell's products, and schools that had cut ties with the company may now sign licensing agreements.
Although claiming the victory as their own, USAS were mindful that it was the result of more than just this year's efforts, which included knocking on Warren Buffet's door in Omaha. (Buffet's company Berkshire Hathaway, owns Fruit of the loom, which in turn owns Russell Athletics.)
"We built on top of USAS victories of the past twelve years, from the sit-ins in the late 1990s that resulted in supply chain transparency and university labor codes of conduct to the formation of the Worker Rights Consortium," the organization said, adding:
We can successfully fight back when those in power take advantage of the economic crisis to attack working people. We should take strength and inspiration from the example of the workers of Jerzees de Honduras. We can fight back — and WIN — against policies that benefit a privileged few and hurt our communities.
This week's victory deserves to be savored and celebrated. But if schools that stopped working with Russell reward the company with new contracts (while continuing to monitor its operations) it could push other apparel companies to follow suit, potentially improving the lives of thousands of workers in factories around the world.
That would be a real landmark for workers' rights in an industry synonymous for too long with the word "sweatshop."
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Comments
Dear Jeremy:
This is a very significant victory for workers in the global economy, especially in the context of post-coup Honduras and the ongoing instability.
The major US media have done an appallingly poor job of illuminating the situation in Honduras, much less coverage of the anti-sweatshop warriors’ victory.
This is consistent with the content of major media on Honduras for some time, where the brutality of sweatshops operated for US firms has been minimized and progressive activists painted in sinister tones, hiding a concealed motive of protectionism.
Here’es an excerpt from a piece I wrote for Extra! in 1996:
“In the Times’ news stories, the fundamental struggle in the global economy is not between exploitative transnational corporations and workers held down at the lowest possible wages under the harshest possible conditions, but between U.S. unionists selfishly trying to hang on to their over-paid jobs and Third World workers eagerly grasping the opportunities extended by multinational corporations.”
Link to article: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18409
Excellent piece, Jeremy. Best, Roger Bybee
Who’s the Real Exploiter?
This theme emerged in the controversy over TV talkshow host Kathie Lee Gifford, who had been charged by Charlie Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee with profiting from the use of 13- and 14-year-old Hondurans to make her Wal-Mart clothing line. (See EXTRA!, 9-10/96.) In a June 27 New York Times story (6/27/96), reporter Stephanie Strom suggested that Gifford had been unfairly singled out and held to an unrealistic standard—“Monitoring work and pay conditions in the thousands of factories that make clothing for American stores would be an all-but-impossible task”—by critics who weren’t really all that interested in the situation of Honduran workers: “In fact, some experts say Western campaigns against low-wage factories overseas mostly benefit the American labor movement and do more harm than good in poor countries by draining off scarce jobs and choking off investment.”
“To advance its own hidden agenda, Strom wrote, U.S. labor has chosen to pillory the unfortunate Gifford, who “now figures that much of the time she had hoped to spend with her children Cody and Cassidy will be eaten up by meetings with labor activists and politicians.”
“No doubt the Honduran workers toiling on the Kathie Lee clothing line for up to 20 hours a day will be able to identify with her plight of being unable to spend time with her family. However, the similarity stops there: The Hondurans producing her clothes would be unlikely to spend time in meetings with labor activists unless they were willing to take the risk of being fired. For years in the “free trade” zone in Honduras where Gifford’s clothing was made, any sign of union activity had swiftly induced firings by management, the National Labor Committee says.
“The absence of real rights and choices for Honduran workers is equally absent from Larry Rohter’s July 18 New York Times piece, sub-headlined, “U.S. Critics See ‘Monstrous Sweatshops,’ But Hondurans See Better Life.” The context of systematic crushing of union rights is totally absent from the Strom and Rohter depictions of generally benevolent employers. Only very recently have unions been allowed to form (and their independence and democratic character are open to question.) While some union activity is now tolerated by corporations and the government in Honduras, workers remember vividly that union organizers were often abducted and “disappeared” by government security forces in the early 1980s.
“Other important elements of context are also “disappeared” in the Times articles on the Honduran sweatshops. Life in Honduran factories is “far more complicated than portrayed in the American debate over ‘sweatshops,’” Rohter insists. “What residents of a rich country like the United States see as exploitation can seem a rare opportunity to residents of a poor country like Honduras, where the per capita income is $600 a year and unemployment is 40 percent.” And such misperceptions about “exploitation” may merely serve to conceal the self-interested aims of the sweatshops’ critics: “Many here [in Honduras] say critics from the north are more interested in protecting jobs in the United States than in improving the lot of Honduran workers.”
But sweatshop critics like the National Labor Committee have emphatically repeated that they are not trying to hold up Honduran conditions against U.S. standards, but against the capacity of transnational employers to provide more decent wages and working conditions and respect internationally recognized standards of labor rights. By conveniently restricting comparisons to a choice between the admittedly miserable circumstances of agrarian life in Honduras and working in a “maquila” factory, the Times stacks the deck in favor of corporations that offer steady employment not at the mercy of floods, drought or pestilence. But why not contrast the financial capabilities of companies like Wal-Mart with what they actually offer in pay and conditions for their workers? Such comparisons never seem to occur to the Times. “