Americans Will Know; Change Will Come
A wage below subsistence level, by any other name, is still a sweatshop wage. Industry participants on the White House Task Force cannot escape the common-sense link between paying a living wage and eradicating one of the worst sweatshop abuses - exploiting poverty.
The need for a living wage is not the thought-child of bleeding heart bureaucrats sitting in offices not far from the United Nations. Rather, a living wage is necessary because under sweatshop conditions - writ large in a global economy - the marketplace no longer is the best allocator of resources.
The reality is so skewed that Third World countries, locked in a desperate competition to attract jobs, have entered a downward spiral, fighting each other, slashing tariffs, taxes, regulations and often setting the legal minimum wage below subsistence levels.
The multinationals want this to remain an open playing field where they roam the world in search of poverty to exploit - because “naturally,” they explain, you will find the lowest wages where there is the greatest unemployment and misery.
Nike goes to Vietnam, where it can pay 20 cents an hour; Disney to China, where wages are 13 cents; and Warnaco to Burma, where the average wage is 6 cents.
Nor is there any end in sight to how low wages can sink, given that there are over 1.3 billion people in the world living at the edge of starvation, eking out an existence on less than $1 a day.
This is poverty enough for corporations to grease the downward spiral as desperate countries and people struggle against each other to find work.
Wal-Mart produces garments in Haiti but pays no taxes or tariffs, despite the fact that Wal-Mart’s annual sales of $107 billion amount to more than 120 times the entire Haitian government’s national budget, which is $880 million.
What about the Haitian workers sewing garments for Wal-Mart? What power do they have in this marketplace?
Since their language is Creole, they cannot read the labels on the garments they are sewing. They have no idea for whom they are making clothing.
Haitian workers have never even heard of Wal-Mart or Walt Disney. They know nothing about the size of these corporations, their sales, profits or the obscene levels of corporate compensation. They have no idea what the garments sell for. They have no idea what wages are in other countries.
These workers are in the global economy without the knowledge or tools to defend themselves. Not only are they isolated, they are vulnerable.
They have nowhere to turn in a country where the labor ministry and the courts are dysfunctional. If they raise their voice to defend themselves, they are fired. Outside the factory are 1,000 other desperately poor people ready to take any job.
In Haiti - as in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras - real wages continue to decline.
The world’s greatest survivalist could not exist on the wages Disney and its contractors pay in Haiti. The workers are not asking for $5 an hour or $3, or even $2 - they have put on the table a 58-cent-an-hour wage proposal. They would still be very poor but they would climb out of utter misery.
Despite a year-long campaign in Haiti and the United States pressuring Disney and its contractors in Haiti to improve working conditions, to allow the workers their legal right to organize and to pay a subsistence wage, Disney has barely budged.
The average wage at the Disney contractor’s plants remains 33 cents an hour. No one can survive on this wage.
In eight hours, a worker goes home with 43 cents in her pocket, after deductions for transportation, meals at the plant and other work-related expenses. The workers live in one-room shacks that lack running water, which they must purchase by the bucket for 8 cents. On average, a family needs six buckets a day, which costs 48 cents more than they come home from work with.
To prepare a basic meal of beans, rice and bread for your family costs $2.89 - more than your daily wage. Rent for the one room costs $5 a week. A can of powdered milk that would last an infant one week costs $3.08. Tuition for grammar school costs $7 a month. A child’s pair of shoes costs $2.
Perhaps Disney’s hands are tied; perhaps it cannot afford to pay such wage levels. The facts, however, prove the very opposite. Workers in Haiti are paid just 6 cents for every $19.99 Disney 101 Dalmations outfit they sew, which means that their wages amount to just three-tenths of 1 percent of the sales price.
While this probably sets the record for exploitation, it clearly demonstrates that Disney could meet the 58-cent wage request, which would add 3 cents to the total the workers are paid to sew each garment.
Instead of earning 6 cents per garment, their pay would total 9 cents, less than one half of 1 percent of the sales price.
Disney’s profit would remain enormous, while Haiti would maintain its competitive advantage of low labor costs - 58 cents an hour is still less than 7 percent of the average U.S. apparel wage.
If the Disney Company were to redirect the $181 million in stock options it gave CEO Michael Eisner in 1996 - the largest corporate grant in the history of the world - it could double the wages of all 19,000 assembly workers in Haiti for the next 14 years.
The money is there. This is about greed.
The decency of the U.S. people will eventually drive Disney and the other companies to the table to discuss paying a living wage. It is only a matter of time - only a matter of reaching enough people with the truth.
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