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| Protecting
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LOS
ANGELES TIMES Workers hang on by a thread By Fred Dickey For a half-century, this apparel sewing plant was a wellspring that pumped life into the town. The workday was switched on by the gathering of 400 workers, mainly women, chattering as they punched the clock. Hour after hour, they created a cadence from clacking sewing machines, generating wealth for their bosses and modest wages for themselves. The plant was shut down in June, one of six Levi Strauss plant closures that left the San Francisco apparel giant with just a tiny U.S. manufacturing presence: a plant in San Antonio devoted to quick turnaround products, which have deadlines that overseas plants can't meet. At the end, the Blue Ridge workers stood in small knots, tossed about by a maelstrom of emotions. Some were in shock. Some muttered that they would never again wear Levi Strauss clothing. Most worried about the future. Brenda Pope was one of those. Measured against what most of us feel we need, the 44-year-old single mother asked little. She wanted to live among familiar pines and trustworthy people, create value with her hands and raise her child in the old ways. She did not think she needed a college degree to do these things. She was right, until she made the mistake of pricing herself out of the labor market -- a feat accomplished by earning $14 per hour putting zippers in Levi's blue jeans. When Levi Strauss moved Pope's job out of the country, she became one of hundreds of thousands of American workers who have lost jobs during the past six decades as the garment industry seeks lower wages in less developed countries. In that context, the decision to close the Blue Ridge plant was hardly unusual. Levi Strauss had clung to its last U.S. manufacturing plants long after most of its competitors had fled. Yet when a company such as Levi Strauss, with a reputation for good management and strong relations with employees, finally turns out the lights in the United States, it might be an occasion to measure the human toll, here and abroad, of the flight of garment industry jobs -- and to remember that it's happening so that American consumers, who buy more clothing than any people in history, can get a shirt for $20 instead of $25. In 1950, 1.2 million Americans were employed in apparel manufacturing. By 2001, that figure had fallen to 566,000. In the same time span, the U.S. population almost doubled. Jobs went out of the country, and finished products came in. In 1989, the United States imported $24.5 billion in apparel; in 2001, $63.8 billion. In the last quarter of 2001, 83 percent of all apparel sold in this country was imported. The migration of these jobs is seen as the natural result of globalization, the economic process that melds the technology and finance of the developing world with the vast labor pool of the less developed. This trend is especially attractive to the apparel industry because, basically, all it needs are sewing machines and low-paid workers. Globalization has crept up so stealthily that it wasn't generally recognized until full grown. It accelerated around the end of World War II, when the industrialized world was reshuffling, says Charles Derber of Boston College, author of "Corporation Nation," a book that views corporate power through a populist filter. As American corporations witnessed the economic rise of Japan and other foreign competition, they started looking for an edge, and they found it in cheap labor abroad. "They realized that more money could be made by using those billions of workers as producers as well as consumers," Derber says. Many corporate executives view this sea of cheap labor as an attractive profit center, or, if they find it predatory and distasteful, as a competitive necessity. Economists say globalization will be the platform for developing countries to build their own free-market economies, and that low wages are part of the growth process. Michael Weinstein, a New York economist who has studied the job-flight phenomenon, says of the plight of Pope and others like her: "Any policy you give me for saving that person's job is going to threaten somebody else's. I don't mean to sound callous, but there are plenty of low-end jobs (in the United States) that need filling. If we bar low-cost goods from abroad, it would be the poorest among us who depend on these products who would be punished most harshly." In other words, it is the poor who would suffer most if, say, clothing at Wal-Mart suddenly cost more. Weinstein adds, "We don't need garment jobs to have full employment for Americans. It's a good thing when these jobs go to the worst-off people in the world. I regard it as unconscionable to clamp down on sweatshops that are making these people's lives better than they would otherwise be." The search for the worst-off people in the world means the garment industry is looking for a target that's always moving. As soon as wages rise in one country, work can be moved to another. Charles Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee in New York City, calls this long-distance shuffle a "race to the bottom" of the wage scale. The committee has a list of hourly apparel wages in developing countries, including: Guatemala, 37 cents; China, 28 cents; Nicaragua, 23 cents; Bangladesh, 13 to 20 cents. In addition to low wages, manufacturers in many countries benefit from child labor and long workdays as well as the absence of health plans, environmental protections, workplace safety standards and efforts to organize workers. In fairness, some U.S. apparel makers, Levi Strauss among them, have taken steps to police conditions in plants overseas, and to pay fairly. But those efforts are far from universal. "
American companies make showcase visits to these offshore plants, but
they always get the VIP tour and are maneuvered to talk only to employees
who have been coached for such occasions," says Kernaghan, an old-style,
angry labor activist who knows his enemy, doesn't trust him and never
gets too close. Low-cost labor To Derber, that explanation is code language that actually says: We're going for the cheap labor, and we don't want the dirty hands of ownership that go with sweatshops. The goal is to have "plausible deniability" about labor conditions. He said that foreign plant owners are rarely steeped in touchy-feely management techniques and operate with the backing of powerful politicians who can impede whatever government oversight might technically be on the books. Asked why Levi Strauss contracts out its manufacturing, President and CEO Philip Marineau gives several competitive business reasons, then he pauses and acknowledges, "The apparel industry is chasing low-cost labor." For Levi Strauss, the advantages became obvious this year. In the third quarter, which ended Aug. 25, Levi's sales were up 3.5 percent, its first increase since 1996. Five weeks ago came an agreement to sell a new line of lower-priced jeans through the vast Wal-Mart Stores Inc. chain. Marineau predicted that the new Levi Strauss Signature brand would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales each year -- all from garments made abroad. To its credit, Levi Strauss has been a pioneer overseas, creating a corporate code of standards for every manufacturer with which it contracts. Levi Strauss also pays inspectors to enforce the standards. But Weinstein says enforcing the codes of various private groups and international organizations is not achievable. Groups such as the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and the International Labor Organization have no real leverage to control American multinationals because the United States has such vast economic clout. "Say the Philippines has a beef against American trade practices," he says. "What are they going to do, refuse to do business with the U.S.?" That segues into a main Kernaghan point. The labor activist says the most effective step against globalization abuses would be to pass legislation in the United States prohibiting the entry of goods from countries whose products fall short of acceptable standards. In other words, the United States would be saying to multinationals operating offshore: We can't stop you from making clothing in sweatshops, but you can't sell it here. " We have the power to determine what comes into our country," says Jay Mazur, retired president of Unite, the union that traditionally represented most American apparel workers. "We say cocaine can't come into our country; so we can say that goods produced in sweatshops can't either." Kernaghan
and his allies (human rights
advocates and
some labor
unions,
but thus far not many
politicians) believe
that such
legislation would eliminate
the common explanation
companies give for abusing
humane
standards -- we do it because
our competitors
do. Opponents
argue that the law
would send clothing prices
higher
in the United States. Race
to the bottom In the sand-blown Mexican border town of Piedras Negras, two hours southwest of San Antonio, a mother of five says she earns about $55 a week sewing cloth bags at the local factory. The woman, who did not want her name used for fear of reprisal at work, earned twice that much working on Levi's jeans at a large factory two years ago. But it closed and the jobs moved to Central America and the Far East. The closure left her and her husband, whose own job is spotty, with far more bills than money. The family lives in a two-bedroom, crumbly stucco house. Today, she worries that she will fall behind on her sewing quota. She is not as nimble as she once was. She holds her bladder until lunch or quitting time to avoid slowing down. She knows that 100 people would line up for her job, and would gladly take the latest starting wage of about $35 per week. There is no job security and no one to appeal to because the union in her plant is as answerable to the company as she is. This year's economic downturn in the United States has hurt the Mexican apparel industry, but most jobs were lost because companies moved to countries with lower wages, says Julia Quinonez, head of CFO (Border Committee of Women Workers) in Piedras Negras. She says that 4,500 apparel jobs have disappeared from that small city in the past three years and that wages have gone from $4 per hour 10 years ago to an average of 80 cents today. Quinonez says the jobs are going abroad, or farther south in Mexico, where wages are about 60 percent of those along the border, and labor protections are rarely enforced. Martha Tovar, president of Solunet-InfoMex, an economic research company in El Paso, says that 68 textile plants closed in Mexico last year, depressing conditions in the border area. Prices are so high, they cross the border to buy beans and rice, and occasionally some chicken or cheap beef. When told that some housekeepers in Los Angeles earn her weekly income by lunchtime, the mother's eyes widen and she says, "How can that be?" Her ambition is to gather her family and slip across the border, where she wishes to find out if such stories can be true for her. Asked how she would do that, she shrugs. "I'll just use a guest pass to cross over, then not return." She has little curiosity about the companies responsible for her wages. She would, however, like to ask them -- whoever they are -- "Why is it that you can't pay me enough so I can live decently? So that I can feed my family chicken even once in a while?" She
is
not an
economist
and
she
has never
heard
of
globalization, but
her
instincts tell
her
that the
job
that allows
her
barely to survive
is
soon going
the
way of thousands
of
other jobs
in
her town.
In
the race
to
the bottom,
it
turns out,
Mexico
is
in the rearview
mirror. Lisa Rahman would consider that Mexican family blessed with riches, because $1 an hour far exceeds any amount the 19-year-old garment factory worker would dare dream of when asleep in her family's shack. Her closer-to-earth ambition is to double her income to about 30 cents per hour. That would mean chicken in her rice maybe once a week. Rahman lives with and is the main support for her parents and two young relatives in the vast slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. All she can afford is one room. During the rainy season, the family collects the bedding and moves to the one dry corner so that they don't get soaked. She has never gone to school, ridden a bicycle or seen a movie. Her wages allow the eating of chicken maybe once every two months. She describes the neighborhood:"Ninety to 100 people in my neighborhood all use one water pump, one outhouse and one stove with four burners." Rahman has worked in garment factories since she was 10, the last three years at the Shah Makhdum factory. She says she often works from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m. seven days a week, with a day off maybe once a month. Her take-home pay is the equivalent of 14 cents per hour. The factory is hot, and the drinking water is dirty. If she gets sick and can't work, she doesn't get paid. If she gets sick often, she'll be unpaid permanently. Rahman is waiflike -- about 5 feet and 110 pounds -- and has round eyes that float in her still-young brown skin. Everything about her begs for a protective arm around her, but that draws her no slack on the job: "If we fail to meet (production quotas), the supervisors yell and curse at us. They curse our parents and call them filthy (names). Sometimes they slap us." One product that Rahman worked on most recently was for the Walt Disney Co., a contract purchaser from the factory. It's a Winnie the Pooh shirt that retails for $17.99. Asked to guess the shirt's retail price in the United States, Rahman says, "About 50 or 100 taka," which is 86 cents to $1.72. Richard Dekmejian, an international relations expert at the University of Southern California, makes a judgment on where globalization is leading us: "Third World countries have no choice but to let these companies operate so their teeming populations don't die of hunger. People take what crumbs they're able to catch. But the overall impact of globalization is that the rich get richer and the poor starve. That will eventually lead to an explosion. It's inevitable." Union
veteran Mazur
is more
sanguine. "The
world sees us as the great
economic
engine, and they just
want it to work for
them, too. By
giving the world fair
wages for labor, we would
create social
stability, and
make peace more possible." Hopeless
situation " Lots of kids give him a hard time. They call him pizza face and stuff like that. It just breaks my heart. He once asked me, 'Momma, are you ashamed of how I look?' When the doctor told him about the lupus, the only question he had was, 'Am I gonna die?' " Pope has been pushed around by life, but some of it was her own doing, and she knows it; to wit: the two men she married, including Brian's father, whom she divorced 10 years ago. She says she anticipates drudging trips to the welfare and unemployment offices, and endless job hunts that promise little for her limited skills. She could flip burgers for about $6 an hour -- if they'd hire a middle-aged woman with a G.E.D. and an old-fashioned work ethic -- but that wouldn't be enough to save her house and pay the costs of treating her son's sickness. "I'd dig ditches if the pay's good," she says. No one in Blue Ridge, currently, is looking for a woman who has sewn a couple million zippers into pants. In fact, not many in Blue Ridge are looking for anyone. The town is rapidly turning into a mountain resort of antique shops, summer houses for rich Atlantans, and retirement and convalescent homes. In job-availability shorthand, that comes down to bedsheets and bedpans serving those low-paying industries. The
state of
Georgia has
set up
a job
agency for
the former
Levi Strauss
workers.
State
employees eagerly
staff job
banks, but
for far
too few
positions.
They
encourage people
who can't
type to
learn computer
skills, and
provide some
funding to
go back
to college
or trade
school. That's
of marginal
value to
middle-aged
people
conditioned to
manual work
and who,
in any
event, can't
afford to
stop working
while going to
school. " They said they was going to give us a commemorative denim bag." She pauses for the irony of that to settle. "Twenty years, and I get a denim bag made out of the same damn scraps I threw in a basket?" She laughs. "I just can't wait to get that denim bag." Brian chuckles, too, but isn't sure why. Asked about his mother's situation, he responds with a child's heart. He smiles at her proudly and says he wants to give back his allowance to help out. She hugs him tightly. As I walk down the driveway, I look back and see Brenda and Brian Pope standing on the step holding hands. American consumers are blessed in many ways. As the nation's standard of living has risen and the cost of clothing has dropped, homes have grown bigger, as have closets. Shopping for clothes has become a pastime for millions of people because they can afford to do it regularly. Thanks to this Levi Strauss closure, we can buy, say, five shirts for $100 instead of four. The cost of having that fifth shirt? Higher welfare, health-care and job retraining costs for hard-working people like Brenda Pope, the shrinking lives of people like Lisa Rahman and the family in Piedras Negras, and perhaps the explosion forecast by Dekmejian. It
is part
of the
American
character
to believe
that
things
will
always
get better.
However,
many
poor
countries
are mired
in the
depression
that
says
bad
things
never
change.
Both
are often
right.
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