Global Trade's Human Toll

In soft-spoken Spanish inside a packed lecture hall, Sofia Sazo summed up her treatment at a Guatemala City factory that makes clothing for The Gap.

“At times,” she said through a translator, “at times, it is humiliating.”

Some days, she worked nearly around the clock, returning home at 4 a.m. to bathe and go back to work. To use a squalid restroom, she had to show a guard at the door a supervisor’s pass, and if she took more than five minutes, she was in trouble. She was bodily searched at the beginning and end of each long shift, touched in private places.

“One has to work,” she says simply, explaining why she endured the intolerable conditions.

Now a union organizer, Sazo came to New York in late January to tell her story at a forum of American and international workers sponsored by the AFL-CIO. All spoke with great dignity. There was no self-pity, in spite of experiences that could easily merit it. All they asked for was respect, or as Sazo put it, “to remember that all of us are human beings.”

Meanwhile, down Park Avenue at the posh Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 3,000 of the world’s richest businesspeople, politicians and socialites were starting four days of networking and lavish parties under the auspices of the World Economic Forum.

The annual event, normally held in Davos, Switzerland, drew thousands of protesters to New York, from union members to environmental activists to anarchists. The Jan. 31 union forum and subsequent rally outside a Fifth Avenue Gap store was entirely peaceful and other groups’ protests, teach-ins and marches throughout the weekend were generally trouble-free, with only a handful of arrests.

“It was important for us to counter — peacefully
counter — what was happening at the Waldorf,” said CWA President Morton Bahr, who participated in the AFL-CIO forum. “While they were wining and dining each other, talking about ways to make the global economy work for their businesses and their own bank accounts, we heard from the people who are paid — at most — a few dollars a day for cutting, stitching and assembling the products that make those fat bank accounts possible.”

News media and pundits had a tough time explaining just what happens at the World Economic Forum, which is largely closed to the press. It shapes no policy, drafts no position papers. Participants herald its panels and workshops that address global economic matters but a New York Times editorial was skeptical: “If history is any guide, these high-minded tutorials will be hard pressed to compete with the week’s tightly packed schedule of cocktail parties and networking luncheons put on by the 1,000 major corporations underwriting the forum.”

The two-hour workers forum, at Florence Gould Hall on East 57th Street, was moderated by AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka. “They say the backlash against globalization stems from an ‘image’ problem,” Trumka said, kicking off the round table discussion. “It’s not an image problem, it’s a reality problem.”

The foreign panelists have made clothes for Nike, Reebok, Adidas, The Gap and other top brands. Though the companies routinely claim their plants are monitored and employees are well treated, panelists told of supervisors who strike and scream at workers, unsafe work areas, 18-hour work days and pitiful pay — earnings that, even in developing countries with low median incomes, don’t amount to a living wage.

When the Kukdong plant opened in Adlixco, Mexico, in 1999 to make athletic shoes, workers were promised fair wages, day care for children, transportation, and other enticements. “It felt like a privilege,” worker Santiago Perez Meza said. “We were extremely proud to be working in a transnational company that offered such good benefits.”

After the first month, employees learned they even had a union — but not the kind familiar to most American workers. This was a company union and every worker was required to join.

“The union that came was not there to protect the workers. It was there to protect the factory,” Meza said. “Our requests were ignored.” They asked for safe transportation, for food in the cafeteria that wasn’t rotten and wormy, the right to go to the bathroom as needed, the right not to be yelled at and hit. “We were asking for basic rights, not more pay,” he said.

Routinely working weeks without a break, they asked for days off and an end to excessive forced overtime. Meza said when a volcano erupted in a community where many workers came from, the company gave the affected employees a day — one day — to help their families.

Workers realized that unless they formed their own union, nothing would change. They started to organize and courageously walked out of the factory on a day when the company was rushing to fill orders for Nike and Reebok. Meza and four other union leaders were fired but the organizing drive, backed by student, union and religious activists around the world, ultimately succeeded.

He said the days of women being forced to lift their shirts for searches, the physical and verbal abuse, the spoiled meat for lunch, are over. “We’re proud to say that with our new, independent union, this is the past,” he said as his rapt listeners cheered.

Another member of the international panel was Han Dongfang, a hero to workers in China. A former railway worker, he now hosts a weekly call-in show on Radio Free Asia. He was imprisoned for two years after protesting at Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the government massacred hundreds of citizens fighting for democracy.

His radio show takes calls from workers across China. He recalled a woman working at a toy factory — making plastic figures for KFC kids’ meals — who said that two days a week when orders were heavy they had to work from 7:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., return from lunch at 1 p.m. and work until 5:30 p.m. and then work all night, from 6:30 p.m. to 5 a.m. The other five days they were lucky — they got off at 1 a.m. “And they make less than 20 cents an hour,” Dongfang said.

He recalled another worker in an American plant making microwave and refrigerator parts who cheerfully told him that the company was giving workers one apple every day. She was so grateful that she’d lost sight of what the company was failing to provide. “They had no pension, no medical care,” Dongfang said. “An apple a day replaced all that.”

No matter how oppressive their job is, few workers quit. Not only do they need the steady, albeit low, pay, but Dongfang said some companies insure against losing workers by forcing them to pay a deposit to be hired. The deposit may amount to less than $10 but it’s a fortune to a Chinese family. That was the case with the toy worker, who told Dongfang that after the rush on KFC toys her hours “returned to normal — 10 hours a day, seven days a week.”

He reminded the audience of Americans that even “American” cars contain wires and other parts turned out in Chinese sweatshops. And he cautioned listeners to be skeptical of monitoring reports that suggest factories are clean and safe and workers well treated.

“Monitoring is selective. Workers are threatened not to tell the truth,” he said. “Monitoring doesn’t work. Rights can only be protected by freedom of association and collective bargaining.”

For the American workers on the panel, globalization
has had a different impact. While the battle for basic human rights at work was largely won in the first half of the 1900s, many Americans are now losing good, living-wage jobs as companies pack up and move to countries with cheap labor and weak laws protecting workers and the environment.

The North American Free Trade Agreement has cost more than 1 million American jobs since 1994 and the figure is expected to surge under the pending Free Trade Area of the Americans agreement, which will create a free trade zone throughout North and South America and the Caribbean, except Cuba.

Russ Sheffler, a member of the United Steelworkers who was recently laid off in Cleveland, decried the fact that there are 30 American steel companies in bankruptcy at the same time the country is importing up to 30 million tons of steel a month.

Having seen the devastating effect on Cleveland, Sheffler went to Seattle in 1999 to take part in labor-sponsored events at the World Trade Organization protests. Up to that point, he hadn’t thought about severe hardships on workers in other parts of the world, but was moved by the thousands of international participants who spent their meager savings to travel to Seattle and make their voices heard.

“The corporations who are exploiting these workers — I think it’s a shame, I think it’s a crime and I think some of these CEO’s should be in jail,” he said to wild applause.

But he said American workers can’t continue to take their rights for granted. “I think the corporations don’t want to lift the standards of these people here,” he said, nodding to the international panelists. “I think they want to bring us down to that level.”

In fact, there are pockets of America where workplace conditions are unbearable, such as illegal sweatshops in New York’s Chinatown. Agnes Wong, a sewing machine operator in Chinatown for 20 years and a UNITE organizer, estimated that 20 to 30 percent of the city’s garment workers toil in sweatshops that exploit undocumented immigrants. She said they are paid $2 an hour or less and are fired if caught talking about forming a union.

But now even legally employed, unionized garment workers are struggling. In the post-Sept. 11 recession, thousands have lost their jobs, including Wong. “It is very difficult to find a job, a very bad situation for working families,” she said. “We hope that government and big business are listening. Today, we hope the whole world can hear our workers’ voices.”