Screw 'Em To The Wal-Mart
An excellent LA Times exposÈ by Nancy Cleeland, Evelyn Iritani and Tyler Marshall about the low wages and poor working conditions of foreign sewers contracted by Wal-Mart:
When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. demands a lower price for the shirts and shorts it sells by the millions, the consequences are felt in a remote Chinese industrial town, at a port in Bangladesh and here in Honduras, under the corrugated metal roof of the Cosmos clothing factory.Isabel Reyes, who has worked at the plant for 11 years, pushes fabric through her sewing machine 10 hours a day, struggling to meet the latest quota scrawled on a blackboard.
She now sews sleeves onto shirts at the rate of 1,200 garments a day. That's two shirts a minute, one sleeve every 15 seconds.
"There is always an acceleration," said Reyes, 37, who can't lift a cooking pot or hold her infant daughter without the anti-inflammatory pills she gulps down every few hours. "The goals are always increasing, but the pay stays the same."
Reyes, who earns the equivalent of $35 a week, says her bosses blame the long hours and low wages on big U.S. companies and their demands for ever-cheaper merchandise. Wal-Mart, the biggest company of them all, is the Cosmos factory's main customer.
Reyes is skeptical. Why, she asked, would a company in the richest country in the world care about a few pennies on a pair of shorts?
The answer: Wal-Mart built its empire on bargains.
Right. And how much is saving five bucks worth to you?
If these workers had better job offers elsewhere, they would take them. I bet they're all grateful to have a job.
Luke Ford at November 27, 2003 8:29 AM
Surely, they are glad for those jobs. Which still doesn't make it moral to gouge them. The sad thing is, without regulation, there'd surely be Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fires all over the place. Laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work -- much as I wish it would -- because so many people aren't ethical without being forced.
Amy Alkon at November 27, 2003 9:05 AM