Still, monitoring is the sweatshop opponents' great hope. Watchdog groups say that only people outside of the company can win the trust of workers and evaluate complaints. ''That is where you get problems that won't show up in paper records and interviews with management,'' said Sam Brown, executive director of the Fair Labor Association, a labor advocacy group in Washington. At the time, however, no one had ever done it, said Mr. Brown, who is a former Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and past director of Action, federal domestic volunteer agency.
Sam Brown is executive director of the Fair Labor Association, a labor advocacy group in Washington
Labor Standards Clash With Global Reality
By LESLIE KAUFMAN AND DAVID GONZALEZ
Published: April 24, 2001
Six years ago, Abigail Martínez earned 55 cents an hour sewing cotton tops and khaki pants. Back then, she says, workers were made to spend 18-hour days in an unventilated factory with undrinkable water. Employees who displeased the bosses were denied bathroom breaks or occasionally made to sweep outside all morning in the broiling sun.
Today, she and other workers have coffee breaks and lunch on an outdoor terrace cafeteria. Bathrooms are unlocked, the factory is breezy and clean, and employees can complain to a board of independent monitors if they feel abused.
The changes are the result of efforts by Gap, the big clothing chain, to improve working conditions at this independent factory, one of many that supply its clothes.
Yet Ms. Martínez today earns 60 cents an hour, only 5 cents more an hour than six years ago.
In some ways, the factory, called Charter, shows what Western companies can do to discourage abuse by suppliers. But Gap's experience also demonstrates the limits to good intentions when first-world appetites collide with third-world realities.
Ms. Martínez's hours are still long, production quotas are high, and her earnings are still not enough to live on. She shares a two-room concrete home with a sister, two brothers, her parents and a grandmother.
Yet the real alternative in this impoverished nation is no work. And government officials won't raise the minimum wage or even enforce labor laws too rigorously for fear that employers would simply move many jobs to another poor country.
The lesson from Gap's experience in El Salvador is that competing interests among factory owners, government officials, American managers and middle-class consumers -- all with their eyes on the lowest possible cost -- make it difficult to achieve even basic standards, and even harder to maintain them.
[Excerpt]
Still, monitoring is the sweatshop opponents' great hope. Watchdog groups say that only people outside of the company can win the trust of workers and evaluate complaints. ''That is where you get problems that won't show up in paper records and interviews with management,'' said Sam Brown, executive director of the Fair Labor Association, a labor advocacy group in Washington.
At the time, however, no one had ever done it, said Mr. Brown, who is a former Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and past director of Action, federal domestic volunteer agency.
