Bob Warring: Uncomfortable in your clothes:thoughts about sweatshops

Is anyone interested in a closetful of brand-name clothing?

Most of the items aren't overly worn and only a few of them have marks or stains on them, primarily badges of honor from wing-eating contests of yore. Some of the stuff is what you might even call "stylish;" at any rate, it looks more or less like the clothing everybody else at Penn wears.

Actually, there's really very little wrong at all with the garments themselves. It's how they may have been made that's come to bother me.

A class-action lawsuit filed in 1999 against clothing companies utilizing sweatshops in Saipan -- an island in the western Pacific with territorial status similar to that of Puerto Rico, and formerly a sweatshop haven -- has alleged horrors that seem all but unimaginable at the turn of the twenty-first century.

According to the complaint, many factories in Saipan forced prospective workers -- usually young women from the Chinese mainland -- to pay "recruitment fees" ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 and to sign "shadow contracts" in which the individual agrees to waive many basic human rights, including the right to date, get pregnant or go to church.

Once on the island, workers were frequently forced to work 12-hour days, seven days a week. Oftentimes, this was in the form of unpaid but mandatory "off the clock" and "volunteer" work. Conditions were dirty and accidents such as "sewing your finger" -- where the sewing needle goes through the bone and comes out the other side -- were commonplace.

Much of the clothing produced in Saipan in this manner ultimately ended up in America bearing "Made in the USA" labels, since Saipan is, technically, part of the United States.

Sound disturbing? Consider the companies named in the complaint. There's some you may have heard of: Brooks Brothers, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, J. Crew, Liz Claiborne, Nordstrom, Phillips-Van Heusen, Polo Ralph Lauren, Sears Roebuck and Tommy Hilfiger, to name a few.

Oh, yeah. And OshKosh B'Gosh.

Now that's sinister.

To these companies' credit (or because they feared a damaging court battle), they have decided to settle and agreed to an independent monitoring system that will enforce respect for basic human rights, oversee the provision of safe water and food and ensure that overtime pay is given for overtime work. But this potential settlement has been upheld through the delay tactics of a couple of other companies named in the lawsuit that you may have heard of, such as Levi Strauss, JCPenney, Target and the Gap (which, do not forget, owns Banana Republic and Old Navy).

At any rate, Saipan is just one of many places where sweatshops -- and the practices described above -- thrive. The new world economy, deregulation and freer movement of capital have made sweatshop labor a truly global problem. Vibrant sweatshop economies exist in Mexico and Central America, Eastern Europe, Southern and Southeastern Asia, China, the Philippines and Indonesia. Individual sweatshops have also been found in such cities as Los Angeles and New York -- cities in which the Department of Labor has found that roughly two-thirds of garment factories violate minimum wage and overtime laws, as reported by Sweatshop Watch, an anti-sweatshop public advocacy group.

Nor is the use of sweatshop labor limited to the companies I have named thus far. Corporate giants Wal-Mart and KMart have come under fire for alleged abuses, as have shoe manufacturers Nike and Reebok.

I was shocked to learn of the utter pervasiveness of the use of sweatshop labor, as I hope you are, and I met with Melissa Byrne, College of General Studies student and regional organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops.

I think I was looking for some easy answers and, ideally, maybe even a list of what to buy and what not to buy. I figured that I probably had little power in fighting an evil system, but at least I could end my complicity in it.

Unfortunately, short of walking around naked, now I'm not sure how to do that. Lifting a foot and displaying a popular sneaker, Melissa explained, "Everything on us was probably made through exploitative labor."

I didn't like this one bit. Couldn't I just eschew brand-names altogether and deck myself out in Penn gear?

No, that wouldn't work either. Clothing bearing university and college names and logos is not made in a fundamentally different way, she said. Unfair labor practices and sub-living wage pay is commonplace here, too.

I admitted to her that, contrary to my hopes and expectations, I still felt uncomfortable.

Maybe that's the point, she said. Bob Warring is a senior History and English major from Hanover, PA.

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