Like many progressive activist organizations found on the Web, the Internet homepage of the National Labor Committee (NLC), a New York-based NGO, opens with an “urgent action alert.” In mid-June the bulletin detailed a struggle taking place at the Chentex factory in Nicaragua, a massive jeans-production plant in the country’s Las Mercedes free-trade zone. According to the site, workers at the factory have been under siege since late April, when company management, responding to a one-hour work stoppage called to demand progress in stalled wage negotiations, fired nine union leaders and brought in armed police to intimidate activists. For the last six weeks, the situation at Chentex has remained in a stalemate, as the union refuses to back down and the foreign factory owners throw up barbed wire fences and hire thugs to terrorize the workers.
This dispatch from the front lines of the global economy is just one of an all-too-large, and growing, list of worker abuses that has seized the attention of human rights activists and organizations in North America and Europe. The National Labor Committee, which defines its mission as working “in support of human and worker rights,” is partially responsible for the explosion of energy around labor rights issues during the past few years. In 1996 the NLC uncovered Kathie Lee Gifford’s connection to sweatshop abuses in Honduras during House hearings on international human rights. The ensuing Kathie Lee hullabaloo—accompanied by the horrifying discovery of a slave labor compound in El Monte, California a year earlier and a series of exposés on the conditions of Nike factories in Asia—helped to ignite the now-booming anti-sweatshop movement.
Without a doubt, the anti-sweatshop movement is one of the most dynamic progressive campaigns on the scene today. So far, the movement’s achievements have been relatively modest. A majority of companies boast corporate codes of conduct that, at least on paper, guard against abuses, and some companies have conceded to disclose the locations of their factories, giving NGOs a chance to investigate working conditions. Some precedents have been set in establishing the right to independently monitor factories. But, as the Chentex episode reveals, abuse and repression of workers, poverty wages, and health and safety dangers remain widespread, as does industry intransigence. In the battle for public opinion, however, the movement has gained a major success: In less than a decade, the anti-sweatshop groups have convinced the U.S. public of a simple, undeniable fact—labor rights are human rights.
This idea is embodied in the charter of the International Labor Organization (ILO) which, though it has no enforcement power, lends a moral force to the idea that employers have the same obligation to respect human rights as do governments. The ILO has adopted four fundamental human rights Conventions in labor rights: the elimination of forced and compulsory labor, the abolition of child labor, the elimination of discrimination in employment and education, and freedom of association and collective bargaining. But it has required a great deal of effort to convince public opinion in the United States that basic human rights must also apply to the workplace. In this increasingly globalized economy, the argument must be made as urgently as ever. When 51 of the 100 largest economies in the world are corporations, not nation states, company managers are just as likely as any callous dictatorship to brutalize people.
The litany of abuses taking place in low-wage factories around the world mirror the sort of repression often directed by military governments. In the Mexican city of Tehuacán, for example, jeans factories employ armed guards to keep workers in line. Local human rights groups there report that the guards are paid up to ten times as much as the employees they guard. In some Asian countries, workers making products for U.S. companies often must sign shadow contracts that waive their basic rights.
By tolerating these sorts of abuses, U.S.-based companies are essentially profiting from repression. In the face of industry refusal to deal with regular violations, anti-sweatshop groups have consistently made a simple demand: Basic liberties must not stop at the workplace door.
In some countries where U.S. companies do business, such as China and Vietnam, authoritarian regimes prohibit the formation of independent unions. But even in the growing democracies of Central America and Indonesia, independent unions are uncommon. In these places it is not state-sponsored repression that restricts freedom of association. Rather, it is intimidation by factory managers that crushes any democratic efforts to establish collective bargaining. In the political realm it is universally agreed that governments should not use excessive force against peaceful demonstrators, but in the economic realm it happens all the time, as when company managers attack striking workers.
There is also the employees’ right to ask for a raise or file complaints against their employer. At the most elemental level, this right is the same as freedom of speech. We expect that all people should enjoy the liberty of being able to criticize their leaders, or, as the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says, “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” So, too, should individuals be free to criticize their bosses, and to petition their employers for redress of grievances. But in many low-wage countries where U.S. companies have set up shop, this right is routinely suppressed.
When workers are able to bargain collectively, form independent unions and ask for raises, they will be more empowered and much more able to secure for themselves a living wage. Most Americans would recognize this as the “inalienable right” to pursue happiness. Workers earning a living wage will be able to accomplish what should be taken for granted—to pay for quality health care, schooling and toys for their children, even some kind of occasional entertainment. A living wage allows people to live their lives with dignity. And dignity, it must be remembered, is a human right.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jason Mark is Communications Director at Global Exchange in San Francisco.
