By Trisha Reimers
More than 50% of US garments are made in sweatshops. The vast majority (up to 90%) of sweatshop workers are women. In Australia, there are more than 300,000 outworkers. These outworkers are paid a few dollars an hour, or a pitiful amount per piece, while companies like Nike, Ralph Lauren and Disney rake in the mega-profits.
When people think of sweatshops, the image that comes to mind are dark, cramped and dirty places out of a Dickens novel. Sweatshops aren't supposed to exist in this globalised world, and certainly not in "the lucky country", where there's supposedly equality for all and you get a fair day's pay for a fair day's work.
The reality is that there are sweatshops operating in Australia, and hundreds of thousands of people are being forced to work in conditions that are not only illegal, but inhumane. Twelve-hour shifts, sexual harassment, wages of $1.70 an hour (there have been cases of workers in the US receiving 6 cents an hour!) and unhygienic working conditions are what a lot of outworkers face.
Sweatshops exist in a range of guises. Hundreds of dark and cramped single rooms where a single worker works for 15 hours a day do exist, but sweatshops can also involve dozens or even hundreds of workers. The conditions remain the same. Generally, a sweatshop can be distinguished by what the business does or doesn't do. If it doesn't comply with national minimum wages or it doesn't provide benefits like sick leave or maternity leave for its workers, but it does have compulsory overtime and uses child labour, you've found a sweatshop.
Outworkers are predominantly women from migrant backgrounds. Many speak little or no English, so can't easily find another job. This means that they are vulnerable to highly exploitative employers, particularly if the workers are undocumented ("illegal") workers and bosses can threaten to turn workers in to the authorities if they don't accept what is offered.
Isolation means that sweatshop workers are often unaware of their rights, and have little or no contact with unions. The Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia (TCFUA) has been campaigning to raise awareness about sweatshop labour, and attempting to make contact with outworkers to inform them of their rights.
So why do sweatshops continue to exist? The simple fact is that for big corporations, profit comes first. Sometimes clothing, shoes or other products can be produced most cheaply in a sweatshop in a Third World country, where there are lower (or no) health and safety standards, low minimum wages and restrictions on the workers' rights to free speech and association. This has been the case for decades in Indonesia, where Nike and other Western capitalists operate.
Nike employs around 120,000 Indonesian workers, and pays them about $2.50 a day. Indonesian unions and labour groups have estimated that $4.25 is a basic liveable wage in Indonesia, but Nike and other corporations continue to find it very profitable to sell shoes for $100 or even $200 when they were produced for five dollars.
Corporations choose carefully which Third World country they will invade — whoops, invest in — next. Repressive governments can be more profitable than democratic ones, because repressive governments and their militaries keep unions and radical workers in line.
But sometimes corporations want to produce "locally". When companies want to proclaim that something is "Australian-made", they have no qualms about setting up sweatshops or employing outworkers and paying the worker who make the product as little as 2% of what it is sold for.
The point is, wherever a sweatshop is in the world, it remains a sweatshop, and workers are exploited whatever their nationality, unions are sidelined or repressed whatever the country and it's up to us to support the struggles of the workers who are fighting for their rights.
The anti-corporate movement that has stretched from the "Battle of Seattle" to S11 to M1 has taken up the issues of sweatshop labour as part of its struggle for global justice. As long as it is profitable to exploit people in sweatshops, corporations will do it because under this system, profit always comes before people and the environment.
What can we do about sweatshop labour?
- You can check out the links your university has to corporations like Nike or Microsoft. More and more universities are funded by corporate sponsors. Activists should run campaigns against this on campus.
- Become more informed about the issue. The campaign against sweatshop labour is growing world-wide and lots of organisations are researching details of sweatshop labour. Good sources of information are the newspaper Green Left Weekly at <http://www.greenleft.org.au>, internet sites like Fairwear's at <http://vic.uca.org.au/fairwear> or the US site of the Feminists Against Sweatshops at <http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops.html>. You can also contact the TCFUA to find out what they're doing in your area.
Resistance believes that we need to not only reject the existing system, but to fight and build a new one, a system that puts people's needs and environmental sustainability before profits for a wealthy few. It has always been the struggles that have involved large numbers of mobilised people that have won in the past, whether it was the 8-hour day, the vote for women, or the fight to save the Franklin Dam in Tasmania.
Why don't you become a part of the struggle for a world without sweatshop labour?