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(The following is an excerpt from Thieves in High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back by Jim Hightower (pp 217-220). It tells of the efforts of Pierre Ferrari of the Coca-Cola company and Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream to produce high-quality, inexpensive garments in the United States while ensuring that workers are paid wages above the poverty-level wages paid in sweatshops in the US and abroad. These sweatshops produce the garments we typically buy at stores like Wal-Mart.)
One place that's bringing change is the very place that this multi-billion-dollar industry most fears - the marketplace:
"We were drinking coffee one morning in Vermont. There'd been an article in the New York Times about sweatshops that morning, and we were shaking our heads about it because it quoted some industry people saying, 'That's just the way it sorks, it's the economics of the industry, it's globalization, it's what it takes to compete.'The "we" in this conversation was Pierre Ferrari and Ben Cohen. Pierre, whom I'm quoting here, has twenty-five years in the corporate world, having risen to the high post of V.P. at Coca-Cola. He was also on Ben's board of directors - Ben being the puckish entrepreneur, social activist, marketing whiz, fine human being, and cofounder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream company. Rather than just having a cuppa joe, clucking their tongues about the problem, and going down the road as we sane people would've done, Pierre and Ben decided to look into it.
"Well, we're business guys. We didn't know anything about the garment business, but it didn't make any sense to us that you had to run a sweatshop to make a profit. We thought that sounded like bullshit."
Ferrari immersed himself in the economics of garment production, reading traveling, talking to people in the trade. Yes, it's a tough business, he learned but not because of labor costs, which have practically nothing to do with the cost of the product, much less the price and profitability of the blouse or shirt you're wearing.
(I hate to do this to you, but it's going to be necessary to put forth the we-est bit of math here, and, unfortunately, math often requires numbers, some of which I plan to use in the very next paragraph. I know it's scary, but it really won't hurt you, and you'll be a more informed, confident, and I daresay stronger person as a result of what you're about to learn. Let's try it, shall we?)
It takes an efficient worker about
two and a half minutes to produce a T-shirt. Dividing this rate of
production into the going wage in various parts of the world, here's the
wage-cost of a T-shirt that you might buy at Wal-Mart of Talbots or anywhere:
| Asia
Latin America Los Angeles sweatshop U.S. minimum wage |
1 cent
4 cents 16 cents 21 cents |
Let's go with the high figure of 21 cents. That's what a U.S. minimum-wage worker gets out of a T-shirt that you'll pay somewhere between 10 and 20 bucks to buy. Working a year at minimum wage adds up to barely $10,000 gross pay - poverty.
So here's a question: What if that wage was doubled? Or even more? What if the workers were paid not 21 cents per shirt, but - what they hey, let's go crazy and thros in a whole extra quarter - paid 46 cents per shirt? This would mean the workers would be getting more than $20,000 a year! It's not a fortune, but it gets you out of abject poverty... it's a livable level of pay. And that extra quarter, which would mean so much to the workers and their families, would have no impact at all on your and my clothing budget.
"Come on," says Ferrari, "this industry ahs been exploiting people for a lousy 25 cents?" Yes.
Thus was born TeamX. It's a new garment factory in Los Angeles, financed with an initial $1.2 million from the Hot Fudge venture capital fund of Ben Cohen. But this company is new in ways much more significant that its air-conditioned building and state-of-the-art equipment. It's new in approach. It's mission statement declares:
"TeamX seeks to change the lives of garment workers, both those that it directly employes, as well as the hundreds of thousands of other workers in this global industry, [by creating] a sustainable model that can be replicated worldwide."
You can read more about TeamX at the following websites:
SweatX: Clothes With a Conscience
Going Down the Road: Dressed for Success - The Nation
SweatX:
Discrediting the Sweatshop Model - Humanity & Society