If you’ve ever checked the tag on a polo shirt, wondering where it was made, and whether workers there are treated fairly, Charles Kernaghan has touched your life. He heads the National Labor Committee, a New York-based group that campaigns against sweatshops and for workers’ rights worldwide. It has taken on some of the biggest names in the nation’s apparel and clothing industries. College campuses not too long ago shook with student protests based on the group’s overseas work. It’s a tiny operation, but Kernaghan, a graduate of Chicago’s Loyola University, seems to have the drive of 100 workaholic CEOs. Labor unions and the clergy closely support the group’s work.
Q: Yours is among the very few organizations that take on the challenge of sweatshops. Why?
A: We are in a global economy. I stopped in your newspaper’s gift store downstairs and you walk right through the products of the world. The products are from Malaysia, Indonesia, Honduras, El Salvador, Pakistan, Colombia. We are in this global economy and very few human-rights groups were looking into worker rights. What we found out is that companies really have escaped any accountability or visibility. Companies are free to roam the world in search of low wages. There are no regulations, and sometimes no taxes.
Q: But isn’t it good if you are from Taiwan and you need work and an American company ships work there? Maybe there is something in global capitalism that is good for these poor countries.
A: We are not a “Buy American” organization. We don’t put trade walls up around the U.S. We don’t support trade boycotts. But essentially what you have is a global economy where there are no checks and balances. Firms are free to pay the lowest wages and violate workers’ rights. And so the issue for us is not to bring jobs back to the United States.
You are not going to bring a job where they are paying 4 cents an hour to the U.S. But these are U.S. companies. This is the largest market in the world. We have an enormous say to raise standards around the world. And all we are saying to the companies is that we want you to be held publicly accountable.
Q: But if the laws are being broken in Honduras or Vietnam, they have their own laws to protect them. Why can’t we rely upon those?
A: Well, it never works like that. Multinational companies are so powerful. And I use the example of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart’s annual sales are $137.6 billion. That makes Wal-Mart’s economy larger than 155 countries in the world. And when they go into these countries, they are told they don’t have to work with unions, there will be no occupational safety, and they can pay below subsistence wages. What we find is that the local labor ministries are so weak and corrupt and undertrained.
Q: Is every garmentmaker that goes to Mexico or Asia out to drop to the bottom level in terms of wages and working conditions?
A: Well, they have. For example, El Salvador is now the seventh largest exporter of apparel to the U.S. It’s a tiny country. A little more than 6 million people. There are 225 factories and 70,000 workers, all of them young women, producing 581 million garments a year for exportation to the U.S. Despite the 60 cents an hour starvation wages that barely meets a cost of the living, despite the forced pregnancy tests that are illegal (the women are forced to pay for these tests and if they test positive they are fired), despite forced overtime and all of the abuse, there is not one single union.
Q: You publicized the role of Kathy Lee Gifford in these factories. But hasn’t she improved the conditions there? I’ve seen her say on television that she had taken on a role, and she would rather be involved than withdraw from them.
A: Sure, we never asked her to leave. We had a meeting with her in 1996 when we first revealed that children, that 13-year-olds, were making her clothing in 13-hour shifts, for 31 cents an hour and she signed an agreement. She said that she would never again use sweatshops, that she would pay her workers a living wage so that parents could raise their children with dignity and justice and that she would open her factories for independent verification by local respected religious and human-rights groups.
I can only speculate but when she showed this agreement to Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart said she was nuts. You are going to bring Jesuits into our factories? She hired a for-profit monitoring firm and that is exactly what we asked her not to do. We’ve had hundreds of meetings with workers and they have told us they will only trust the local people they know. You can’t parachute into a country and monitor those factories for two days a year.
Q: But the reverse is also true: If you live there you are much more likely to face danger and challenges.
A: We’ve done it and it has been successful. The first independent monitoring and verification project was in El Salvador and it was a factory that produces for The Gap. And the Jesuit University, its human-rights department, is monitoring that Gap factory.
Q: So how have conditions changed?
A: We’ve had locks taken off (to allow access to) the bathrooms. No forced overtime. Better ventilation. Things that might seem small to us are not when you are forced to be in that factory. I can’t talk about this stuff too much. In Honduras in 1993 and 1994 13 percent of all workers were children. But you don’t see that anymore. As a result of the pressure, the companies want to avoid these conditions.
Q:It seems you have a forest fire and you are using a pail of water to put it out. You can only cite one company here and there.
A: Sure, of course.
Q: Is there any company that has turned around and said `We want to cooperate with you?’
A: No. I think the companies were allowed to be so much on their own, they went further out on a limb. So when you start to turn some visibility onto these companies, they go into a panic. If the president of the United States went to the head of Wal-Mart today and said, `Can I please have a list of the factories that make your goods?’ Wal-Mart would say `Sorry, this is proprietary information.’
Q: So you are losing?
A: No. We are winning. We are doing it the opposite way. We have already won disclosure in a number of cases. When we began a campaign for the right to disclosure, the companies flat out said: `No. We’ll never ever give it to you.’
Well, guess what? University students at the University of Michigan and at Illinois and Duke and Georgetown, they won full disclosure. You cannot produce for Duke if you will not disclose the name and the address of the factory. So just about a month ago Nike had to release the list of 42 factories that produce for five campuses. So the crack is in the door.
Q: The universities became very active, but do most Americans, when you talk about abuses in China or elsewhere, care at all?
A: Yeah, they do. A recent poll said that 67 percent of the people did not want China (where labor conditions are controversial) to join the World Trade Organization.
Q: I don’t see people who are shopping pick up a T-shirt and say `I won’t buy this because it comes from (whatever) country.’
A: Sure, you can’t. In your store downstairs all of the toys are made in Mexico and China. But you can’t tell people on one hand not to buy that product and then go do work with the people in that country. And the people in that country don’t want a boycott that will hurt their jobs. We want to keep the jobs in those countries. What we are saying is just ask the companies to do the right thing.
Q: What about the stars who advertise these products?
A: Kathy Lee Gifford said it the other night. The stars all run for cover. What Gifford did at least is that she didn’t back away. She said `I don’t do it. I don’t believe in sweatshops.’
After fighting with her for a couple of weeks, she turned around and said sweatshops are out of control. They are like cockroaches. But not one single other celebrity came out to support her. Not Mike Jordan. Nobody.
So in some sense she has been alone although she comes up far, far short. Imagine if Michael Jordan said `I don’t want these sneakers.’ We tried to get to him.
Q: And what was his response?
A: He said his job was to play basketball and Nike’s job was to make sneakers.
Q: You are still a small group. If there is such an outrage over this, I imagine that religious and labor and other groups would be pouring money into your pockets and saying `Do this and that.’
A: We are a small organization. We have five people. We have a shoestring budget. If we did penguins and whales we would be very well-funded. But when you talk about human beings and worker rights, everyone runs. It is a sensitive issue because you are talking about your own multinational companies.
Q: But the companies treat us seriously because they know this is a battle over the hearts and minds of American people. The companies are thinking, `Where will these (campus activists) be 10 years from now?’ Five years ago we didn’t have a social movement against sweatshops. But there is one today.
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An edited transcript
