Putting hardly-paid kids through a garment fire so you can wear those 70s retro socks just isn’t worth it.
Fortunately, you don’t have to make that choice. As I mentioned back in 2010, Skater Socks makes those stripey tube socks in all kinds of colors right here in the USA, so you know that your socks aren’t being made by forced labor, child labor or poisoned labor.
Three years on, my Skater Socks are still going strong, so now I can tell you they’re long-lasting, too. Give ‘em a shot.
On average, CEOs of fast food restaurant chains make $25,000 every day. That’s more than twice what fast food workers who are given New York state’s minimum wage make in an entire year. In the same time that CEOs make $25,000, workers in their restaurants bring in just $56.
Fast Food Forward is paying attention. “While fast food corporations reap the benefits of record profits, workers are barely getting by – many are forced to be on public assistance despite having a job,” the organization observes. Fast Food Forward is doing more than just talking, though. The group is working to organize workers in fast food restaurants, bringing their voices together so that they can obtain an income that’s closer to what they deserve.
Don’t you think the CEOs can afford it?
Industry marketers call them smart phones. Given this week’s news, it might be more apt for American consumers to call them sweat phones.
Just one week after the release of the Apple iPhone 5, workers at a factory in China rioted after security guards at the factory began beating workers waiting in line. Apparently, beatings at the factory are commonplace.
This factory is named Foxconn, and is the same factory where working conditions were so bad that a large group of Apple’s outsourced workers ran up to the roof of the factory and threatened to commit mass suicide if the things didn’t improve. Apple was embarrassed, and promised to make sure fair working conditions would be instituted at Foxconn. That promise, we now can see, was not kept.
Of course, it’s not as if Apple’s touchscreen telephone competitors are shining examples of workplace ethics. Samsung, for example, was just caught using child labor at one of its factories in China.
Those who are ethics savvy as well as tech savvy may do well to refuse to buy any new mobile devices from companies like Apple and Samsung until they begin manufacturing their products in countries where there are decent, well-enforced labor laws.
Here at Irregular Times, we have not been uncritical in our reporting on the Occupy Wall Street demonstration. There have been strong conceptual and organizational problems with the protest, and we’ve noted those.
We have not repeated, however, one of the most cruel attacks made against the Wall Street occupation: That the protesters are just a bunch of kids who have never worked a day in their lives.
Not all of the protesters are young, in fact. What of those who are? Their youth is nothing to hold against them. Jealousy of older people against the young is not wisdom.
There is no evidence at all that the Wall Street protesters are lazy. Lazy people don’t protest for two weeks straight. Furthermore, no one has ever provided any facts to establish that the Wall Street protesters have been employed any less than other people their age.
To attack young Americans for being out of work is especially nasty given the current economy. Older Americans, because of the ongoing economic crisis caused by risky behavior by Wall Street financial firms and by the decade-long state of warfare, are holding on to their jobs. The number of jobs for young Americans is exceptionally small. The protesters are occupying Wall Street because corporations whose stock is traded on Wall Street markets have withheld trillions of dollars of liquid wealth with which jobs have been created. It’s because the corporate system has created high unemployment that the protest is taking place.
The protesters want to work, and they are working right now, on the behalf of millions of other working Americans. That’s why, starting yesterday with the Transit Workers Union, organized groups of workers began joining the Wall Street occupation protest. Today, more workers’ unions will join.
Anyone who says that the Wall Street protesters don’t know the meaning of work has not been paying attention to the actual protest. More and more people are paying attention to the Occupy Wall Street protest, though. Yesterday, Senator Bernard Sanders spoke out in support of the Wall Street protest, and called upon working Americans to come together and participate in what is now being called the occupation movement.
“We desperately need a coming together of working people to come together to stand up against Wall Street, corporate America, and say enough is enough,” said Sanders. Members of Congress are taking this week off of work. Instead of attending fundraisers with lobbyists and CEOs, senators and representatives should be on Capitol Hill, working on legislation to eliminate corporate tax loopholes, restore the estate tax, end our nation’s expensive wars, and reinvest that money in the good government programs we need to get America working again.
American corporations are holding two trillion dollars in cash in their accounts. That’s just their liquid money. They could spend it tomorrow, and give a job to every single American who wants one.
But, the corporations are refusing to give people jobs. They’re refusing to pitch in. They’re just hoarding their wealth, insisting that they won’t share it with anyone else, until they get their way.
Speaker of the House John Boehner is on their side.
Giving publicity to the plight of American corporations, Boehner said yesterday, ““Job creators in America are essentially on strike.”
On strike? With two trillion dollars sitting in their bank accounts? With swanky offices, and corporate jets?
That’s the equivalent of an American worker saying he’s “walking the picket line” while sipping a martini by a backyard olympic-sized swimming pool, with $100,000 in his bank account, and a personal helicopter in the driveway. It’s absurd.
American corporations are not on strike. They’re refusing to hire workers, when they know that tens millions of Americans are desperate for work.
They’re doing it to keep wages low, and to keep their profits high, and to force the government to give them more subsidies and tax breaks.
American corporations are not on strike. They’re holding a lockout.
Americans assume that labor standards in their own country are fair, and well understood. For example, overtime pay comes in automatically for all workers after 40 hours a week, right?
The thing is that standards are different for farm workers. Because people want cheap fruits and vegetables, we have lower standards in the United States for workers in the agricultural sector.
In California, the United Farm Workers is trying to change this unequal arrangement. They’re trying to pressure Democratic Governor Jerry Brown to sign the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act, which would have improved agricultural working conditions in the state – if Brown hadn’t vetoed it back in June. So, farm workers began a 13 day march from Madera to Sacramento to bring their demands to the Governor’s office.
Yes, if this legislation is passed, your strawberries might cost 25 cents more per pint. Isn’t equality worth that price?
If you see a blog post, a Facebook mention or a tweet before the end of August discussing Levi’s Jeans, the “Go Forth” ad campaign by Levi’s and/or the charity Water.org, pay attention: that blogger or social networker may have been paid big bucks to do so.
Irregular Times just got offered $250 to hawk the Levi’s brand and the “Go Forth” advertising campaign. An e-mail we received today:
My name is Scott Lyon, Blogger Outreach Manager at Technorati Media. Nice to meet you virtually. You may have received an email from me or one of my colleagues, Jill Asher or Alex Porter about this campaign – a Paid Post Opportunity – Eco/Green Articles for a Worldwide Clothing Company campaign.
I am excited to inform you that Levi’s® has selected your blog to participate in its Go Forth engagement program (http://www.Facebook.com/Levis) and I am able to offer you $250 in compensation for your article….
Post Requirements
– Write at least 300 words sharing your Go Forth article
– Tie in the Levi’s® Go Forth key messages listed above
– Include a series of images or video clips in your article
– Mention the Levi’s® Go Forth campaign and include an outbound link to the Water.org pledge at: http://www.facebook.com/Levis
– Include the tags “Levi’s”, “Levi’s Go Forth”, and “Water.org” in your post and #GoForth in your tweet
– Promote your post however you amplify your messages – Facebook status updates, tweets, YouTube videos, LinkedIn status updates, RSS feeds, etc.
At the Levi’s page on Facebook to which bloggers are being paid to direct readers (sorry, Levi’s, but no link juice for you), people are encouraged to post a note on their own walls linking people to the Levi’s Facebook page. Right now, the Levi’s page features a link in to an already-set donation of $250,000 to the water development charity Water.org, which is nominally nice but a drop in the bucket considering the multinational corporation’s $4.4 billion in revenue last year. Once all those links and Facebook likes of Levi’s Facebook page are set, Levi’s can use the connections to sell, sell, sell.
It should go without saying that Irregular Times is not accepting this offer from Levi’s, but I’ll say it anyway: Irregular Times is not accepting this offer, or any other offer like it. We never have taken money to write something on Irregular Times and never will. Beyond that issue, the Levi-Strauss company that makes Levi’s jeans isn’t one we’d like to associate ourselves with. Rather than link you to the Levi’s branded websites, allow me to link to some of these reports that describe the ethics of the Levi brand:
Then, early this year, workers reported that Levi Strauss gave Lajat new orders for jeans. This was despite the fact that Lajat refuses to comply with Levi’s Corrective Action Plan, refuses either to reinstate workers or to pay the workers $400,000 in back wages, unpaid overtime, and severance pay, and it fails to make legally required contributions to federal social security and housing funds.
Martha Ojeda, Executive Director of The Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras thinks Levi Strauss should practice what it preaches and quit pampering Lajat. “They can’t have their ethical code and sweatshops too. We call on Levi Strauss to become a leader for labor rights in Mexico and help these workers become the first since NAFTA to win justice on the job.”
Organic Consumers Association:
A federal judge on Saipan has granted class-action status to a lawsuit that alleges that 30,000 factory workers endured sweatshop conditions, rejecting attempts by Gap Inc., Levi Strauss & Co. and other major retailers to have the suit dismissed.
Viola, Petra and their co-workers were not the first – or the last – victims of Levi Strauss & Co. Between 1981 and 1990 the company closed 58 plants and put 10,400 people out of work. It shifted about half of its production overseas, where the best-paid seamstresses made about a tenth of the wages of their US counterparts. By 1990 Levi’s had 600 subsidiaries and contractors in developing countries around the world, including Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia.
Late in 1991 a Levi’s contractor in the US Pacific territory of Saipan was accused of keeping imported Chinese women in virtual slavery, confiscating their passports and forcing them to work 84-hour weeks at sub-minimum wages. A contractor in Indonesia who had been given a clean bill of health by a Levi’s inspector was found to be strip-searching female workers to determine whether they were menstruating as they claimed and thus were entitled to a day off with pay in accordance with Muslim law. Employees of a former Levi’s contractor in Mexico said that at least ten children aged under 14 worked at the plant; workers were laid off for a few days if they went to the toilet ‘too often’, and rain-water poured through the roof, collecting in puddles and causing electric shocks.
Poor health and environmental standards in factories in the developing world pops up as an issue on a fairly regular basis. This time it is the turn of GAP and Levi’s to be under the spotlight, as it is their suppliers in Lesotho that are being ‘exposed’ by the media. Not long ago, UK high street retailer Primark faced the same issue and came out of it reasonably well, but GAP and Levi’s have very different brand images to Primark, and therefore need to be seen to be responding to this issue more proactively.
At the moment, both companies seem to be doing what they should be doing: expressing concern about what they have seen/read, promising to investigate, convening meetings of suppliers to reinforce standards etc. This is pretty much all they can do, and it should be enough to ride out the immediate storm of publicity.
But then what? The real issue for me is that no clothing manufacturers or retailers have really told their story on this issue during ‘peace time’. They haven’t shown us that the vast majority of factories are well-run and providing valuable opportunities for people in developing countries. If they don’t challenge the public perception of ‘third world sweatshops’, then they can’t complain when the public assumes the worst after seeing the pictures and reading the stories in the papers.
There are thousands of workers who have contracted silicosis as a result of their working conditions and the younger they are the quicker they die of it. Many of them are in their early 20s and many are from Kurdish areas as they are the poorest and most easily exploited when they travel to Istanbul to search for work. They showed one young man of 25 who couldn’t walk home with his shopping and his two little daughters of about five and six years old had to take the bags out of his hands to help him. When he got home, he used a nebuliser to help him breathe with less pain, but there is no cure, not even surgery. He is now involved, with the help of a couple of doctors and lawyers, in getting other silicosis victims organised to try to get compensation – they will almost certainly die before any compensation comes through. Levis refused to accept any responsibility, or to be interviewed. I find it just so sick that these processes are used to make new jeans old and ragged so that they can satisfy idiotic fashion dictates and sell at inflated prices in the West. The Turkish government has now banned sand-blasting but the programme produced some evidence that suggests that it is still being used and that Levis are (contrary to their claims), still sourcing jeans from sweatshops using the, now illegal, process as well as other dangerous processes involving potassium permanganate and sandpaper.
I’m sure Levi-Strauss is trying really, really, really, really hard to start paying its third-world workers a living wage and stop poisoning them. I’ll let the multi-billion dollar Levi-Strauss company tell you about that on their own dime. If Levi’s company representatives want to post comment here explaining how wonderful their participation in the toothless corporate-run “Fair Labor Association” is, I can’t won’t stop them.
As for Water.org, I can’t fault a charity that aims to spend money on clean drinking water projects in the developing world. We’ve sent money to that cause ourselves through Charity:Water. I encourage you to read Water.org annual reports before making any donation: its share of donations spent on fundraising and administration costs are higher than the median, but not outlandishly so.
