July 23rd, 2009
Team Sweat:
Yesterday afternoon I met with 17 comrades representing 12 different NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and trade unions at the Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation (LBH). We met to discuss a number of issues, including: the current activities of Team Sweat, both in Indonesia and the USA; creating a broad vision and strategy for engaging Nike on the conditions of workers in Indonesia; preparations for a meeting today with Caitlin Morris, Nike’s Director of Innovation and Sustainability; and coordination of worker meetings and field research for the two weeks I will be in Indonesia.
Along with the issues mentioned above, we also had a lively discussion on the history of the campaign work done on the Nike sweatshop issue in Indonesia as well as how to best move forward in our future campaigning. From our conversation, it became clear that much of what has been done by Nike and has been reported on by the press regarding Nike’s “social responsibility” has been window dressing that has distracted both unions and NGOs from what should be our core activities: educating and organizing workers; and using organized worker power to pressure Nike to truly be responsible for their labor force in Indonesia.
The three key demands that we must maintain our focus on are:
1. Living wages;
2. Guaranteeing freedom of association when workers want to organize, join and/or be active with trade unions;
3. Establishing collective bargaining agreements to which the unions, the factory owners, and Nike are all legally bound.
For those who are not as familiar with the history of the Nike sweatshop issue in Indonesia, during the period of 1995-2002, these were the issues on which we focused and with sustained pressure, both in Indonesia and through international solidarity, gains were made. We need to get back to these, remain focused, and push forward towards victory for the workers who are producing the real wealth for Nike.
Ok, that is today’s update. Tomorrow I will write with a report on the meeting with Nike’s Caitlin Morris.
Solidaritas!
Peace, Jim Keady
July 20th, 2009
My Nike Nightmare
Written by D. Jayadikarta
Edited by Wakidi
It was May 2000 and I found myself bouncing on a wooden bench masquerading as a passenger’s seat in a public mini-bus in Southern Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. I was on my way to a job interview with Fengtay Enterprises, Ltd., a Taiwanese-based company that proudly manufactured Nike footwear for overseas markets. The sun was perched high, the road was covered with dust, and potholes seemed to be everywhere. The mini-bus passed so many factories along the poor winding road that I did not even have time to read names on the sides of the buildings, they were producing everything here from chocolate to garments to electronics.
Although the road was designed for vehicles to access the factories in Southern Bandung, it was built with cheap materials – most likely some local official lined their pockets with the money that was to be spent to build a proper thoroughfare – and I stared to get car sick as the mini-bus swerved to avoid the potholes. I was desperate to arrive at my destination and I thought that my long, uncomfortable journey would never come to an end.
I finally arrived and found myself standing in front of a tall, pale blue, steel gate. The gate was emblazoned with a dark blue globe logo with the initials IW in the center. I later found out that IW was the Nike factory ID for Fengtay and that each factory in Asia had its own two-letter Nike identifier. There was no Nike Swoosh or pictures of Michael Jordan with his $200 basketball sneakers to be found. This was very different from the images I had of Nike, generated by their slick advertising in the Jakarta malls. I thought, “I cannot be in the right place. This doesn’t’ look like a Nike factory, it looks like a prison.”
I walked towards the security office and asked the guards stationed behind the glass sitting at their desk if this was where I was supposed to be. “Yes, Fengtay Enterprise, Ltd.,” he said with a cold, suspicious look. I was relieved. The last thing I wanted to have to do was get back on that mini-bus and I certainly did not want to be lost in the polluted slum that surrounded the factory complex.
A few weeks after the job interview, I was officially employed at Fengtay. But there was no feeling of the excitement that one usually gets when one finally lands a new job. Even though I was unemployed for a while, a result of the economic crisis in Indonesia, I just was not elated by my new position, something seemed wrong about it from the beginning. But what choice did I have? Since the crisis, people like me had lost hope of finding work that had real meaning or hope a future. You simply took the best job you could get to avoid poverty and hunger, unless you wanted to live on the street and attempt to survive on instant noodles everyday.
I was told that Fengtay employed around 9000 people from around the neighborhoods of Bandung and Banjaran. It was such a massive factory complex. I worked in the main office building in the Business Department. Due to the nature of my work, I had to leave the office more often than my co-workers and tour the factory floor where those famous Nike shoes are born. On my first walk through the plant, I was completely shocked to hear factory managers (you know them by the pink identity badges hanging from their shirt pockets) swearing at workers as if they were dogs. As if this were not bad enough, I saw women workers, late in their pregnancies, pushing massive cartloads of materials for making shoe uppers. I had never seen anything like this. Is this what all the factories were like in my country?
That night, back in my room at the boarding house, I could not sleep at all. I was haunted by the images of those young, female factory workers – most of them high school graduates in their late teens and early twenties - being verbally abused by the managers. I felt that I was trapped in a labyrinth of poverty and exploitation. Suddenly, the dream of making Nike’s world-famous sneakers became a nightmare. This nightmare would play itself out day after day, and I would not awaken from it until the day that I quit working at Fengtay.
The abuse was not limited to the factory floor, but could be found in the management offices as well. The Taiwanese bosses felt they had license to mistreat the employees whenever and wherever they pleased. Both the male and female bosses, had one thing in mind – meet the production target – and they did whatever the felt they needed to do to make this happen. If the target was not reached, they may get a low ranking from Nike (which could cost them future orders) and they would not let this happen. Through this single-minded focus on meeting targets, these women and men lost their sense of humanity. They became machines, slaves to Nike’s production quotas. The young women on the factory floor paid the harshest price and were abused regularly. It did not matter if it was your first day or your five hundredth day – you were to work, fast, like you have never worked before.
Everything had to be done to perfection to meet the target and Nike’s quality standards. If the managers feared this was not happening, workers were yelled at, they were called “dogs” and “goats.” At times the screaming of the managers rivaled the screaming of the machines on the production lines. Their mouths spewed filthy words, their weapons to motivate workers, to boost production on the lines to meet the export date targets. Targets – that was what it was all about.
The factory reluctantly supplied lunch to the workers. When I first saw what was served, I doubted that what was wrapped in the brown, plastic-coated paper could qualify for human consumption. Once I opened it, I felt pity and shame. The food was complete rubbish; low quality rice, stinky, tiny salty-fish, and chunks of a mystery vegetable. This menu for workers was repeated over and over again.
Not far from the giant lunch shed where workers ate was a nice, clean, modern building where the Taiwanese bosses dined. Their meals were of the highest quality. They also had modern accommodations on-site and even a little golf course to entertain themselves when they were stuck at the factory for the weekend.
These Taiwanese managers were so arrogant and dictatorial. They ran they factory like a totalitarian regime. You couldn’t even expect a smile from them, because to them, you were less than human. To them, you were “labor,” another line item on the balance sheet, a commodity to be bought and used at the cheapest price possible.
The Taiwanese all held the highest and most influential positions in each of the divisions at the plant and they walked around the factory complex like spies, keeping tabs on all the workers’ activities. If they found something that they didn’t meet their standards, they felt they could do anything they wanted to rectify it. If you were lucky, they only scolded and yelled at you in a “special meeting” with the Chinese-Indonesian interpreters. If it was your unlucky day, you were demoted to the lowest rank on the production line.
When I think of my time at Fengtay, I liken it to having your body covered with a rash. It itches and burns each day and you feel the discomfort, mentally and physically, but it does not kill you and you press on. Yes, my Nike nightmare brought me to the darkest point in my life. I no longer knew what it meant to be a human being, running freely and enjoying life, like Michael Jordan or any of the countless others at Nike that make their millions off our sweat and broken dreams.
I came to Fengtay to be a part of the Nike dream, to share in their success, and hopefully to help my nation move out of the economic crisis. But instead, I spun my wheels on the Nike treadmill and generated wealth for everyone – the Taiwanese managers, the Nike executives, the Nike athletes, the Nike shareholders – but my fellow countrymen and women. In the end, I was no better than when I started.
Then, some questions started popping into my head. How did these Taiwanese bosses get like this? Was their behavior the result of the pressure they were under from Nike to meet the production targets? Why were these things happening my country? Why had we Indonesians ended up being slaves in our own land to foreign interests?
One day I went to one of the fancy malls in central Jakarta. I stood there, outside the Plaza Indonesia, looking up at a giant Nike ad, the Nike Swoosh painted on a massive glass window display, and I started to cry. I could not get the workers out of my mind. And then I saw the prices being charged for the Nike shoes that were made at factories like Fengtay. I had to pause and take a deep breath to avoid being overcome with even more emotion. There were the Air Walks, the Air Macs, the Air Rifts, the Baby Jordans, the Jordans, and all the other latest models. Why were the shoes so expensive, priced at a level that only those in the highest class could afford? I knew what they cost to make and what workers were paid. It just was not fair.
The workers know that their jobs at the factory will not make them millionaires, but they do want fair salaries and a future for themselves and their children. Is that too much to ask from Nike? Perhaps if the Nike executives walked in their shoes for a while, perhaps if the Nike executives lived in the workers’ hovels in the villages, perhaps if the Nike executives felt the workers’ sweat poured out on the factory floor each day, then maybe they would understand. If they understood, then perhaps these Nike executives would show workers the respect they deserve and they would treat them with honor and dignity in their homeland.
July 14th, 2009
Kristus datang untuk orang-orang yang miskin, terlantar, dan terpinggirkan. Ia tidak memilih menjadi manusia yang hebat dan berkuasa, tetapi manusia lemah, miskin, tak berdaya. Ia lahir sebagai bayi miskin, didakwa di hadapan wali negeri Ponsius Pilatus, sampai akhirnya Ia dihukum mati. Kematian, kebencian dunia atas diri-Nya adalah risiko pilihan-Nya untuk menjadi manusia yang miskin dan tak berdaya. Orang-orang miskin dan bodoh adalah mereka yang terdepak dari dunia ini. Dalam kemiskinan pun tersimpan potensi pengampunan yang dibutuhkan oleh kita untuk menjalankan rekonsiliasi dalam arti sesungguhnya. Sebab, pengampunan yang sejati hanya bisa datang dari mereka yang pernah menderita dan ditindas. Dan kebanyakan mereka adalah orang miskin.
Meskipun kita tahu bagaimana harus bersikap kepada orang miskin, tertindas dan statusnya dibawah kita, tapi seringkali kita masih melecehkan mereka dalam pikiran (prejudice, generalisasi) dan perbuatan (tindakan sombong, kata-kata angkuh). Padahal datangnya Tuhan Yesus dipandang sebagai kabar gembira bagi kaum miskin dan papa, kaum yang terbuang oleh ketidak adilan dunia.
Kita berada di dalam dunia yang penuh dengan ketidakadilan dan depresi. Jika pada jaman dahulu perbudakan dan penindasan sangatlah marak, kini perbudakan itu berpindah bentuk lewat uang. Banyak sekali saudara kita di Indonesia yang dipaksa bekerja paksa dengan gaji yang sangat menyedihkan dan dalam kondisi yang menyedihkan pula.
Jim Keady, seorang kristen yang dibesarkan dalam lingkungan katolik, tak pernah lelah berusaha untuk membela kaum buruh terpinggirkan ini. Misinya adalah untuk membawa kabar baik Kristus kepada mereka yang miskin dan ditindas. Dia memfokuskan perjuangannya kepada buruh Nike di Indonesia, yang menurut penelitiannya adalah buruh yang sangat penting artinya bagi Nike, tapi sayangnya mereka ditindas dan dipaksa bekerja dalam kondisi yang menyedihkan.
Sudah banyak dokumentasi yang dibuatnya, dia juga pernah tinggal bersama buruh itu, dan hidup dari gaji buruh itu ($1.25 per hari atau sekitar Rp 12,500 kurs saat ini). Setelah berbicara di lebih dari 450 tempat di 39 negara bagian Amerika, kini dia kembali ke Indonesia untuk melanjutkan misinya membantu para kaum buruh tertindas itu untuk mendapatkan hak yang lebih pantas bagi mereka.
Namun hal ini tidak bisa dilakukannya sendiri, sebagai orang kristen kita haruslah menjadi pembela dan penghibur bagi kaum miskin. Tidak perlu berbicara muluk-muluk untuk hidup dan berjuang bersama kaum miskin (seperti Bunda Theresa), namun kita bisa menjadi contoh dengan memperlakukan bawahan kita dengan sepantasnya, tidak berbicara angkuh kepada kaum miskin dan selalu siap membantu para kaum papa dengan segenap hati kita.
Tak bisa dipungkiri banyak orang kristen yang masih bersikap sewenang-wenang terhadap bawahan mereka baik secara sadar atau tidak sadar. Saya sendiri mempunyai beberapa kenalan pengusaha kecil yang masih memaksa kuli nya untuk bekerja dengan kondisi yang memprihatinkan, dengan upah yang jauh di bawah UMR.
Jim Keady, ingin berbicara kepada mereka. Jika anda tertarik untuk mengundang Jim Keady hadir di gereja anda, maka dapat hubungi saya (Aditya - musicpoem@gmail.com ), Jim Keady tidak akan menarik biaya sepeser pun, dia juga tidak akan menjadikan gereja anda ajang mencari dana. Yang akan disampaikannya adalah murni, peringatan, peringatan dan pengingatan bagaimana kita harus bersikap kepada orang miskin.
Saat ini Jim Keady mempunyai jadwal lowong di:
Monday, July 27th
Tuesday, July 28th
Wednesday, July 29th
Thursday, July 30th
Saturday, August 1st
Dengan mengingat bahwa Injil adalah kabar baik bagi mereka yang tertindas, mari kita wujudkan event ini.
July 6th, 2009
Team Sweat:
Please check out the article below that was originally published in Forbes Magazine at http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/01/corporate-social-responsibility-leadership-citizenship-ibm.html.
What does this information mean for a company like Nike that spends millions of dollars and has more than 130 people working full-time on CSR issues. Is anything really getting accomplished with these current efforts or do they need to completely change their strategies moving forward? How much data is Nike gathering from reliable sources in countries like Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and China (the four largest producers of Nike products)? What if Nike put a CSR data collection model in place that rivaled the data collection model they have for manufacturing efficiencies? What kind of information could be collected and then acted upon?
Peace, Jim Keady
Corporate Social Responsibility: Much More Talk Than Action
By Eric Riddleberger and Jeff Hittner 07.01.09, 4:29 PM ET
IBM recently completed its second annual survey of senior executives around the world asking them how they are handling green and sustainability issues in their corporate strategies. The results are encouraging in some respects, but they show how very far businesses still need to go to truly be on the road to sustainability. The overwhelming majority of the 224 respondents said they are committed to incorporating principles of corporate social responsibility into their business strategies–despite the global recession–as a way to improve their business performance, their contribution to society and their reputation. Some 60% said this was more important to them than a year ago; only 6% said it was less.
We now live in faster, flatter, more interconnected world, and that’s changing business strategies as companies become more aware of systemic risk and its consequences. Also, executives recognize that all kinds of stakeholders–investors, partners, employees, governments, non-governmental organizations and above all customers–are very concerned about sustainability issues. They closely monitor what companies do and make decisions based on what they see. These conditions make a strong case for a sustainable approach to doing business, one that recognizes that the long-term health of an organization is inextricably tied to the well-being of society and the planet. And businesses, for the most part, are no longer just paying lip service to sustainability. They’re trying to optimize their operations to reduce environmental impact and improve social effects while also improving business performance. But our survey shows a significant gap between the business and sustainability goals companies are setting for themselves and what they are actually doing to attain them. And information is at the heart of the problem.
Specifically, our survey findings show that:
–Companies aren’t collecting and analyzing the information they really need or aggregating it often enough. Because of that, they can’t implement real changes to fundamentally increase efficiency, lower costs, reduce environmental impact and improve their reputations with key stakeholders.
–Few are collecting enough data from their global supply chain partners, so they’re missing major opportunities to reduce the inconsistency, inefficiency, waste and risk that can ripple through a global supply network.
–Most still don’t understand the concerns of their key stakeholders, particularly customers, and they’re not actively engaging them to find out. That means they’re missing out on knowledge that could improve their businesses and lead to new opportunities.
Here’s an illustration of the information gap problem. Many companies are trying to reduce their energy use and lower their carbon dioxide emissions–to reduce costs and improve efficiency, to meet growing government regulations and to address stakeholder concerns. To be able to do that, they need to know where and how they consume energy throughout their operations, in everything from data centers and office space to manufacturing centers and delivery to customers and the entire lifecycles of their products. Knowing all that, they then need to determine where they can make reductions that won’t hurt in terms of cost, quality and service. Yet in our survey, only 19% of respondents said they are collecting data on carbon dioxide emissions weekly or more often. Most are collecting it only quarterly. That may be enough to meet government or stakeholder demands for information, but it’s not nearly enough to produce systemic change that can reduce environmental impact. Early efforts suggest that collaboration is essential to addressing this gap.
Instead of going it alone, organizations that are leading the way are exchanging information with customers, industry groups and nongovernment organizations to expand their knowledge and benchmark against similar companies. They are joining with partners, suppliers and even competitors to exchange practices and ultimately create common standards for sustainability. Standards are a necessary part of any effective long-term corporate social responsibility strategy. Some of the key findings of the survey further illustrate the information gap and why it’s occurring. Of executives who responded to the survey, 87% said they are focusing on corporate social responsibility activities that will improve efficiency, and 69% said say they’re using CSR to help create new revenue opportunities. But only 30% are collecting data often enough (at least weekly) to make strategic decisions that can address inefficiencies across eight major categories–carbon dioxide, water, waste, energy, sustainable procurement, labor standards, production composition and product lifecycle. Another 24% are collecting this information monthly, and 32% no more than quarterly. A third of the respondents aren’t collecting any CSR information from their supply chain partners. Eight in 10 aren’t collecting supplier data for carbon dioxide and water, and six in 10 aren’t checking supplier data for labor standards. Almost two-thirds–65%–admit they still don’t understand their customers’ concerns about CSR issues, and 37% aren’t conducting any research on the matter.
The bright spot in these findings comes from companies that outperform their competitors in bottom-line results. Outperformers rank consistently higher in collecting every type of CSR information frequently or in real-time across all major green and sustainability categories, from carbon dioxide emissions and water conservation to ethical labor standards and sustainable procurement. They also rank higher in information collection from suppliers. Nearly twice as many of the outperformers said they understand their customers’ concerns about CSR well. They also are more active in collaborating with key stakeholders and twice as likely to rate the sharing of information among business partners and stakeholders as being of the highest importance in achieving their CSR objectives. That indicates a definite correlation between business success and effectively executing on strategic CSR goals.
To succeed in filling the data gap and incorporating CSR principles into your business strategies, you need to consider the following actions:
–Identify your information gaps and analysis needs. Is the CSR information you collect relevant and timely enough to base strategic decisions on? Are you getting the information you need from your business partners and suppliers? Do you understand your customers’ CSR concerns and those of your other key stakeholders?
–Align your objectives with those of your stakeholders and then prioritize. Stakeholders require a lot of information, but their information demands can’t be your only focus. Is your company collecting information that truly helps it meet its business objectives, and is it communicating those objectives to their stakeholders?
–Assess best practices and benchmarks. Have you identified best sustainability practices and benchmarks for your key CSR activities? Are you participating in industry or activity-focused coalitions that are developing preferred best practices and benchmarks? Are there frameworks or scorecards for measuring your activities against overall objectives?
The answers to these questions can help set and prioritize a course of action. A company that advances its CSR strategy through these actions will find itself better positioned to reap the business benefits of more efficient operations and of better balance with the diverse social and environmental ecosystems it is part of.
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Eric Riddleberger is global leader for IBM’s business strategy consulting practice. Jeff Hitter is IBM’s leader for corporate social responsibility consulting. The survey discussed in this article can be found here <http://www.ibm.com/gbs/csrstudy> .
July 6th, 2009
By Jeff Ballinger
(July 2009) THAT NEARLY twenty years of anti-sweatshop activism has come to naught is suggested by the cost breakdown of a $38 University of Connecticut hoodie that appeared in the Hartford Courant a couple of years ago: the workers received a mere 18 cents, while the university received $2.24 in licensing fees. (Mexican factory: profit, 70 cents; overhead, $2.12; material, $5.50–distributor [Champion]: overhead $5.10; profit $1.75–Seller [UCONN Co-Op]: overhead, $14.49; profit, $4.50). The workers’ share could hardly have been lower when the movement began.
Given the worldwide financial crisis, it is a safe bet that fighting sweatshop abuses here and abroad will not be a key policy undertaking for Barack Obama and his team. But this does not rule out a wide-ranging set of initiatives that would significantly empower workers. Tweaking our foreign assistance priorities, revising “democracy promotion,” and undertaking diplomacy from a community organizer’s perspective—these changes in U.S. policy would at least begin an assault on global sweatshop practices. And they are especially important as an antidote to the solipsism of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), wherein corporate “self-regulation” teams are rebranded as “activists” by lazy and compliant media. The new administration needs to connect with real labor activists, in Asia and Central America especially, and allow them to speak for themselves.
But first we need to collect information on sweatshop practices abroad and make it available to activists, who often can’t collect it themselves. Twenty years ago, I worked in the small Jakarta office of the Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AFL-CIO). When my boss visited Jakarta, I described to him the radical inadequacy of the local minimum wage of 87 cents per day. By the Indonesian government’s admission, this provided only 68 percent of the “minimum physical needs” for a single adult. He suggested that I develop a project to monitor compliance with this inadequate minimum: were the workers even receiving 87 cents? USAID had recently made available funds for human rights grants; we applied and received something on the order of $20,000. The discovery of 44 percent noncompliance in 250 Jakarta-area workplaces was shocking and–to our great surprise and delight–avidly reported in the (mostly Suharto-controlled) newspapers. As a result of the publicity, workers began an unprecedented wave of wildcat strikes that resulted in much-improved compliance numbers.
The back-story is interesting. When the grant was discussed at a twice-monthly meeting where the Jakarta USAID Mission reported to U.S. Embassy staff, I was told that a buzz went around the room: “We’re helping who to do what?” Not surprisingly, AID officials received a similar message of disbelief from Nike’s top official in Indonesia after the strike wave and the attendant bad publicity. Did the local AID Mission pull back? It didn’t. In less than a year, I had approval for a grant of well over $600,000 for survey work that reached 172,000 workers; the number of strikes quadrupled, and the minimum wage rose steadily. But this momentum has not been sustained.
There is, of course, a lot of misinformation circulating, in addition to our common lack of information. Nearly all the academic literature on the subject claims that foreign investors pay better wages than local firms. How to explain, then, the fact that 85 percent of the 720 strikes in Vietnam last year were at foreign-investment factories? My talks with workers there in early 2008 confirmed my long-held suspicion that local firms were less abusive and less likely to cheat workers. Another example of misinformation is the work of Columbia University’s Jagdish Bhagwati, who, in 2000, induced 250 other economists to sign an open letter to college presidents, urging them not to give in to anti-sweatshop students’ demands because “the net result would be shifts in employment that will worsen the collective welfare of the very workers in poor countries who are supposed to be helped.” But the numbers from Indonesia tell a different story: when the wage was 87 cents a day, Nike had 20,000 contract laborers there; when the wage was $2.47—after five years of agitation—the footwear and apparel giant had more than 110,000 workers making products for export.
The lesson on the foreign-assistance front, then, is twofold: first, look for “empowering” projects to assist workers directly in local struggles and, second, use survey-research tools to build a database available to local legal aid groups and labor activists. What is most needed is information about dysfunctional governance, which has previously been unavailable to them.
WORKERS RIGHTS should be a fundamental principle undergirding both “democracy promotion” and our public diplomacy endeavors. The approach should be informed by the same caution that a community organizer uses to size up a neighborhood in distress, buffeted by multiple external and internal forces. It is surprising how little we know about how industrial relations play out in the world’s export-processing zones—even after twenty years of press reports and activists’ campaigns. A 2006 New York Times story out of China, for example, quoted a Communist Party report that asserted that there were 20,000 labor inspectors, 1.2 million audits, and over 8 million back-pay awards in 2005. That’s possible, but we really have no clue as to what is actually happening. (For comparison purposes, the United States has 750 inspectors for 130 million workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act.)
Similarly, when a story about Asian workers being mistreated in Jordanian apparel shops appeared in 2006, the Times’s report quoted Yanal Beasha, Jordan’s trade representative in Washington, as saying that Jordanian inspectors monitor working conditions in factories and that the government enforces overtime laws and recently increased the minimum wage for citizens and guest workers. Several workers debunked the claim, but again, there is no reliable data on enforcement.
Obama said before twenty thousand people at Prague Castle, “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.” These standards should apply to governments that oversee vast export-processing zones, as well as to dictators bent on nuclear extortion.
Addressing the rule of law as applied to the workplace ought to be a slam-dunk for the president and our recently re-energized State Department, even given the fact that such a worker-advocacy platform may discomfit countries such as China (our banker), Turkey (prone to nationalist tantrums), and Bangladesh (which has a host of stability concerns), just to name a few. For far too long, autocratic regimes have been getting conflicting advice from American policy makers. The boiler-plate nostrums involving multiparty democracy and clean government made little practical sense when China, pre-reform Indonesia, and Vietnam were experiencing growth rates in the double digit range. The off-the-charts venality of these states mocked the World Bank’s decade-long focus on fighting corruption. That the boiler plate wasn’t serious was signaled in many ways; now is the time to change the signals.
At an appropriate venue—such as a gathering of trade unionists and labor rights activists in Mexico or Thailand—Obama should outline the ways in which workers are grievously disadvantaged in the global economy. Activists across the globe would be thrilled to hear an American president calling into question such neoliberal tenets as the “flexible” workforce and the necessary “reform” of national labor codes—these two together have opened the door to a noxious insecurity of employment. Specifically, he could cite the World Bank’s “competitive index,” which ranks countries higher for ease of hiring and firing, reduced severance benefits, and other employer-friendly policies. Particularly egregious is the recent study funded and heavily influenced by the World Bank. Its report concludes that workers have to sacrifice even more than they have already in the name of economic growth. Organized as the Commission on Growth and Development, it made the astonishing discovery that the developing world’s workers are over protected. The report includes a discussion about how governments need to “mollify the influential minority of workers” in the formal, wage-paying sector. Hence the need for “special zones” with reduced protections—at best, somewhere in between the formal sector and “informal” destitution. The overall findings were praised in a Wall Street Journal article arguing that “there is room for countries to ape the Chinese model.” A 2007 Brookings Institution publication similarly prescribes “ease of hiring and firing” as a primary “condition for maximizing growth.” These are the policies that produce a worker’s eighteen-cent share of a $38 hoodie.
It is clear that a new architecture of rights must be erected, beginning with a no-nonsense survey of current practices. Every labor attaché or labor reporting officer at an American embassy should compile the following facts: Has the country signed International Labor Organization Convention 81 (Labor Inspection)? If so, when is the last time a report was sent to Geneva? How many labor inspectors are there? How many factory inspections were done last year? What is the number of violations found? How many prosecutions started? How many back pay awards were made? Similarly, on the environmental side, statistics need to be collected on factories visited, citations, and types of hazardous waste. And our attachés should also map out the bureaucratic chain of command, with names of responsible local officials and an account of who reports to whom. U.S.-based companies importing more that $50 million worth of goods should have to post these findings on their corporate Web sites—in both English and the local language—for every country in which they have more than three contract factories.
All the inspection/enforcement statistics should be folded into a matrix maintained by a nongovernmental organization working under a several-year grant from the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights, Democracy, and Labor. Alongside the raw numbers, wiki-style narratives should be included on such issues as freedom for NGOs operating in the labor sector, labor history, recent strikes, opinions on the adequacy of the minimum wage, academic papers on all these issues, and contact information for unions and activist groups. Such a program would make possible a global dialogue about key issues. For example, a recent law change regarding severance pay in Colombia addresses the most recent wage-cheating tactic employed by multinationals (declaring bankruptcy and skipping out on substantial payments due to workers); the Dominican Republic has trained lawyers to act as labor standards inspectors but as mediators not in the familiar command-and-control mode. We need to know how this is working out. Again, Bulgaria appears to be quite serious about labor inspection and tracking worker complaints to authorities—we should pay attention to such initiatives.
OBAMA COULD make a very significant contribution to an urgent global problem for which the Bush administration spent upward of $500 million without much effect—“Trafficking in Persons.” The “action” up to now consisted mainly of getting legislatures around the world to pass laws on trafficking; it’s a good bet that the number of lawyers and consultants employed dwarfs the number of organized crime leaders captured. This fact did not restrain the Bush team’s fiery rhetorical pronouncements: the United States and its allies would “stop at nothing to end the debasement of our fellow men and women… the defeat of human trafficking is the great moral calling of our time.” Forced prostitution is the most well-known form of trafficking, but factory workers are also trafficked—and then sweated in legal or illegal shops. It is time to forgo the rhetoric and think about practical efforts to stop trafficking, with reliable benchmarks on our progress.
Officials might start by going after the low-hanging fruit, borrowing from the concept of “low obligational ante” developed by Abram and Antonia Chayes in their writings about getting respect for international agreements across a wide spectrum of countries. For over ten years, it has been common knowledge that foreign workers are being shipped across national boundaries to do factory work, often making products for export. Only last year, an award-winning television exposé interviewed Bangladeshi and Vietnamese workers producing Nike T-shirts in Malaysia in familiar, appalling conditions exacerbated by ruthless labor contractors. It would be simple for the State Department to organize a briefing on “trafficking” for all corporations that know or suspect that similarly vulnerable workers may be producing products anywhere along their supply chains. Those businesses whose executives do not attend—but are reliably implicated—should go to the top of the “watch list.”
The benefits of such a strategy are threefold: Local governments in Asia and elsewhere would see U.S. embassy officials visiting cheated and abused workers; local NGOs would see an administration unafraid to antagonize U.S. firms, and, most important, cheated workers might win compensation, thereby emboldening other workers.
Eventually, such a no-nonsense strategy would undermine the booming Corporate Social Responsibility industry. The shallowness and deceit of the CSR farce may be clearly observed in press reports. The Financial Times, for example, ran a headline, “Nike to promote workers’ rights” in mid-2007, and a news report on Nike in the same paper the very next day described “a push to promote labour rights, including the freedom to form and join trade unions.” This at a time when Nike itself reported fourteen strikes involving tens of thousands of workers. In reality, there is no collective bargaining going on at any shoe or apparel factories in the developing world. A Chinese group released a report in 2007 that underscored this point. It was an assessment of union rights in a factory producing for Reebok where–with much fanfare in 2002–Reebok had persuaded a contractor (the Shun Da Sporting Good Corporation in Fuzhou) to allow a secret-ballot election for union representatives: “The results of the [2007] investigation were extremely disappointing. Working conditions have deteriorated noticeably, and the trade union is doing more or less nothing to further workers’ interests. Interviews with workers uncovered widespread dissatisfaction and distrust towards the current union” (China Labor News Translations).
For weary observers of corporate-dominated globalization, it will come as little surprise that the coordinator of the World Bank’s aforementioned growth commission is economist Michael Spence. Until recently, Spence was the dean of Stanford’s business school–holding a chair endowed by and named after Nike CEO Phil Knight. A decade ago, while a member of Nike’s board of directors, Nobel-laureate Spence told a group of business school students in Singapore that global firms “make nothing” and that corporations must be “ruthless and not tell people you can do it in-house when out-sourcing would do a better job.”
This is the real CSR at work, and it goes a long way toward explaining the failure, so far, of anti-sweatshop activism.
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July 3rd, 2009
Team Sweat:
Team Sweat member, Jeff Ballinger, just passed along the report, WHEN NIKE MEANS STRIKE. The report was published on July 2, 2009 by the Danish Consumer Council. Some of the highlights from the report include:
* 20,000 factory workers at a major Nike contractor in Vietnam went on strike in March 2008 for liveable wages.
* 100 group leaders were fired.
* Zero workers were spoken to by Nike, which claims no workers were fired.
* Six months of intense police surveillance, monitoring and harassment followed.
* Zero free trade unions: despite Nike’s code of conduct promising to protect workers’ rights, the factory unions in Vietnam are still state-run.
* €1 a week extra is the bonus for working with hazardous shoe glue, reveals the Danish Consumer Council in secret conversations with Nike factory workers.
Check the full report out HERE.
Peace, Jim Keady
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