Some words about sweatshops

A Word About Sweatshops from OrganicFairTrader.com

There’s no “official” definition of a sweatshop. It is agreed that sweatshops include manufacturing environments where workers operate in unsafe or unjust conditions.

A sweatshop might use children for labor. A sweatshop may force women to take birth-control pills daily to prevent pregnancy. Sweatshops may be oppressive toward organizers of worker rights in the factories.

Sweatshops may exist across borders where people are desparate and easily held against their will with no accountability to local or international authorities.

Sweatshops may force workers in long hour shifts at a low wage, they may force production quotas, or they might be toxic environments with no worker or environmental protection or enforcement in place.

These factories and farms may be in far-off, hidden places where there’s little opportunity for investigation or discovery of working conditions. For this reason the workers’ rights movement always insists on full-transparency of factory locations and working conditions as a means of installing and montoring a “code of conduct” for manufacturers.

Sweatshop alternatives also present an opportunity for major brands to advance their positioning in the hearts of the consumer. If producers adopt and enforce airtight codes of conduct with transparency all the way from top manufacturers down subcontractors, they can proudly display this in their marketing campagins.

Alas, apparently human rights is not selling point to major brands like Disney, Nike, the Gap, Victoria’s Secret, the Collegic Licensing Company, and others. All of these brands have yet to adopt a transparent and working code of conduct with woker participation toward the abolition of sweatshops in their supply chains.

Sweatshops hurt us all. There’s no denying it.

Forcing children into factory work is wrong and upsets our economy by making Americans compete with workers who cost pennies a day. Forcing women into sterility so they can work unimpeded on factory floors is deplorable. Robbing workers of all ages of their hard-earned pay through “fees” “rents”, “interest” or other loophole schemes is no proper way to run a production outfit.

Harassment and murder of union and labor organizers undermines the natural forces that work in a free marketplace and ignoring these threats to workers across borders and in “free trade zones” with limited protection leads us to a slippery slope that can eventually cause great harm to our economy here at home in America, and also further erode our current workers’ rights which offer us a lot of needed protection.

Remember, in the “global” economy, “protectionism” is seen as a “barrier to trade” that the US uses to upset the market costs and prices for internationally exchanged goods. Evidence of this can be seen in the huge trade-deficit. Protections for american workers and the high standards of living make production here too expensive and operations must be moved overseas.

Now countries who enforce no labor protection standards in the workplace begin to outpace us in production. If we buy this mess of sweatshop-made consumer goods, we’re supporting the system that will eventually bring our standard of living down.

Consumers must demand that products they purchase are not made in sweatshops. Consumers must demand that the clothing, toys, electronics, shoes, sunglesses (you name it) they’re buying are made in full transparency in conditions agreed upon by the workers and the communities at large in the most participatory democratic process imgaginable. And repressive regimes like Myanmar, A.K.A. Burma who enslave whole societies, should simply not be involved in business at all without human rights guarantees for all.

We don’t have the power to set international policy, and it’s a long long struggle for the equal and fair individual determination of peoples’ rights and destiny but right now the best we can do is actively seek products that were not made in sweatshops.

Here at OrganicFairTrader.com one of our missions is to provide “fair trade” alternatives to known sweatshop violators like Nike, the Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Disney, the Collegic Licensing Company (CLC, manages licensing and manufacturing codes at over 100 US Universities), and other major international brands that are known to use contractors and sub-contractors that use sweatshops for their labor.