Chicago Tribune, January 9, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 Chicago Tribune Company
Chicago Tribune

January 9, 2005 Sunday
Chicago Final Edition

SECTION: PERSPECTIVE ; ZONE C; Pg. 6

HEADLINE: Global labor tries to fight repression;
With help from consumers, some sweatshop workers make headway in the battle for rights

BYLINE: By Stephen Franklin, Tribune staff reporter.

BODY:
The hours are endlessly long. The pay is just enough to live on. The work is dirty and demeaning. And if you complain, someone waiting by the factory gate gets your job.
This is the world of globalized sweatshops, a sprawl stretching from Mexico and Central America to Asia and other poverty-stricken places where low wages lure companies on the prowl for an even lower bottom line.
But as the shift of jobs from rich to poor nations of the world accelerates, so too does a small and sometimes barely noticeable effort by these workers and others on their behalf.
Here and there workers, against great odds, have spoken out against repression. Companies that once didn't give a hoot about consumers' protests about workers' conditions in far-flung factories do now. And even insensitive, job-hungry governments have realized that they cannot permit the abuse of child workers and still do business beyond their borders.
`They keep on coming'
"Workers face terrible problems and terrible repression, but they keep on coming," said Cornell University's Lance Compa, a lawyer and expert on global labor conditions. "The thing I find interesting is that people don't resign themselves and give up."
In China, where independent unions are forbidden, workers have staged wildcat strikes and won, he said. And in Mexico, small, independent unions that formerly were kept outside the system have been able to "become players," he added.
This doesn't mean, however, that companies' desire to keep workers' wages down and to cancel out their voices has slowed. Nor does it mean that unions have gained a footing in places where a daily bathroom break is a privilege and nobody ever asks about foul-smelling air or machines that cripple.
As long as companies can shut factories and shift them virtually overnight, sure of finding new workers at lower wages, Third World unions are powerless to bargain for better wages or working conditions.
With 1.4 billion people or nearly half of the world's workers earning less than $2 a day, according to the International Labor Office, poverty leads many to swallow their hopes and pride and to take whatever they can get.
It a cruel fact of life, as a recent ILO report noted, that many workers in poor countries either know nothing about unions or doubt that unions could improve their lot.
"It is difficult to identify a lot of concrete advances. You have a few isolated victories in particular factories in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. But they are outweighed by the defeats that workers have faced," said Stephen Coats, the head of US/Labor Education in the Americas Project, a Chicago-based advocacy group.
Yet, like other veterans of the struggles for workers' rights across the globe, Coats can tick off the changes that have benefited workers.
Whereas children once accounted for a considerable share of the garment workers in Central American factories, that is no longer the case, he and others say.
And while Central America labor leaders once were regularly gunned down by death squads or wrongly imprisoned by their governments, such oppression has largely stopped, the result of publicity stirred by labor and human-rights groups.
Still, dozens of labor leaders are killed or injured annually across the globe. And children bear burdens beyond their ages in factories and on farm fields across the globe, harvesting bananas or sugar cane in the Americas or cocoa beans in Africa, experts say.
One reason for hope is that unions have begun to link arms across the globe. A leader in this movement has been the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, which, according to Cornell's Compa, regularly promotes dozens of global campaigns against companies.
Another is that companies are far more sensitive to complaints from consumers in well-to-do countries about how workers making T-shirts or jeans in less-well-off ones are treated.
New attitude needs action
"Ten years ago most companies said they didn't have any responsibilities for those workers," Coats said. "I can't think of any companies that take that position today. The problem is, now they have to put the words in practice."
Companies pay attention to consumers' complaints, said Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee, an advocacy group in New York, mostly because consumers now listen to pleas from groups like his.
"The change in the U.S. has been significant. In the early 1990s, the anti-sweatshop movement didn't exist," added Kernaghan, who has brought attention to his group by publicizing abuses at factories in Central America and Asia.
A mark of the change in attitudes about sweatshops, he said, was the warm reaction he got recently when he took several teenage garment workers from Bangladesh on a speaking tour of U.S. colleges. From campus to campus, the workers explained what it is like to work for 13 cents an hour.
"Everywhere we went, dozens of students raced to talk with us," he said.
Without growing support from the U.S. and Europe, he doubts that much will change for sweatshop workers.
"What we are hearing from the workers is, `Who is going to going to protect us when we get fired?'"