Americans Show That They Do Care

The man who “made Kathie Lee Gifford cry” says he learned many things while exposing the sweatshops behind the TV talk-show hostess’s line of clothing.

One of the most useful: “These companies are counting on the U.S. people not caring.”

But Charles Kernaghan believes the exact opposite is true. He has indeed seen strong evidence of caring. Kernaghan is the New York-based executive director of the National Labor Committee, a 16-year-old workers and human rights organization.

“During The Gap campaign, we went to 59 cities to educate people about the poor conditions of The Gap’s offshore apparel workers. In every single city, they formed a Gap campaign committee that picked up the issue and kept going with it,” said Kernaghan.

“It dawned on me then - there is such a network for change out there. The potential is almost frightening.”

Indeed, through the efforts of those committees - and picketing high-school students, concerned parents and religious organizations - The Gap was pressured into signing the first-ever independent monitoring agreement for a U.S. clothing manufacturer.

“That was won with a staff of four on a shoestring budget,” said Kernaghan. “The Gap people told us we had the most remarkable communications system they’d ever seen. But we did it with three phones. We don’t have e-mail.”

Born in Brooklyn and shaped by traditional Catholic and Jesuit teachings of social justice, Kernaghan is a dissertation shy of a Ph.D. degree in psychology.

Human rights violations in El Salvador distracted him in the early 1980s; he hasn’t stopped crusading since.

In May, Kernaghan exposed rotten conditions at the Global Fashion plant in Choloma, Honduras, where Gifford’s signature line for Wal-Mart was being manufactured. Among other abuses, children were being paid just 31 cents an hour.

Fighting back tears on her TV show, Gifford said she had had no idea how bad things were. Since then, she has joined the fight to press for independent monitoring of such facilities.

Other Kernaghan targets include celebrity endorsers of clothing, such as Jaclyn Smith, Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal, as well as chief executive officers of some of the most successful apparel companies, such as Philip Knight of Nike.

Kernaghan and several activist groups have hammered Nike and its multimillion-dollar athlete spokesmen and spokeswomen for hawking high-priced sneakers made by Indonesian and Vietnamese workers who earn just pennies an hour.

After the usual indignant denials - “These companies always start out saying, ‘Your information is wrong; we don’t do that,”’ Kernaghan said - Nike agreed to institute independent monitoring.

Last month, Knight and other CEOs met at the White House to discuss other safeguards.

Kernaghan’s latest target is the Disney Corp.’s consumer division.

An offshore toy-, clothing- and trinket-manufacturing enterprise, the division earned more than $1 billion last year, according to Kernaghan. And yet, at five factories in Haiti, manufacturers with whom Disney had subcontracted were paying workers only about 12 cents an hour to make kiddie-kitsch products based on films such as “Pocahontas” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

“That was below even the pathetic minimum wage that the Haitian government set,” said Kernaghan. “After our report came out on the five factories last year, Disney sent investigators down there and cut off the worst of the activity. Now the wages are 28 to 30 cents an hour.”

But, said Kernaghan, “Haiti is as expensive a place to live as the United States. Those people live poorer than anybody I have ever seen.”

Using as an example a Pocahontas shirt that sells at Wal-Mart for $11.97, Kernaghan said: “The Haitian worker earns 7 cents for each shirt. That’s (about) one-half of 1 percent of the price of the garment, which is criminal. They easily could double or triple those wages and it wouldn’t affect Disney’s millions in profits or drive up the price of the garment.

“The workers are asking for 58 cents an hour. Think of the modesty of their request.

“We asked Disney to visit with the workers, see their homes and their children, meet with them in a safe location where they know they will not be beaten or spied on, then fired. Disney won’t even respond.”

However, “these (clothing) companies really do live and die by their image,” said Kernaghan. “They need us consumers in many ways more than we need them.

“Consumers have a power they should never sell short. One letter to a company is like 500 letters; one call equals 250 calls.

“People have to keep their antennae up and keep the issue going out there in their neighborhoods, with their children, their religious communities,” Kernaghan continued.

“I believe there is a basic decency in the American people and that we can tap it to pressure these corporations to get back in a human framework of doing business.”

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