Anchorage does use sweatshop labor
Response to Challenge is vague but certain
By: Ian Overton
In September, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors set a precedent for anti-sweatshop laws passed in the United States. The new ordinance is designed to prevent ‘responsible’ contractors and subcontractors from being underbid by those who allow sweatshop labor conditions with their outsourced labor. This applies only to garment manufacturers for the first year, as a test case. With a strict definition of ‘sweatshops,’ requirements for manufacturers to allow workers to organize, and a $100,000 budget to ensure that those who sign the contract stay true to their word, this ordinance is a real step toward fair and just commerce.
In last month’s ‘Challenge,’ Alaska Humanity News questioned whether Anchorage officials would be willing to prohibit purchasing supplies they knew came from sweatshops. We asked: Do you know if these products are made under just conditions? Are you willing to prohibit the purchase of products made under unjust conditions? Municipality Purchasing Officer Bart Mauldin said he did not know the answer to the first question, since he dealt mainly with local distributors rather than their manufacturers. In addition, as public servants the Purchasing Department is bound by the decisions of the municipality. Mr. Mauldin did note that any local ordinance must be backed up by national policies to be truly effective, which requires a standard of protectionism. The Mayor’s Chief of Staff, David Ramseur, had no idea about either question, and referred this author back to Mr. Mauldin. Mr. Ramseur did say, “Generally we try to purchase goods and services as cheaply as possible,” noting that other rules may apply.
It is a difficult to prove that our fire, police and bus uniforms don’t come from sweatshops, since some manufacturers don’t list working conditions and/or locations. Fechheimer Brothers produces these uniforms in unionized factories located in the Midwest and East Coast. San Francisco Knitting Mills has unionized factories in California and Arkansas, but doesn’t discuss its plants in the Dominican Republic. Blauer has three plants in the Midwest but doesn’t discuss conditions. Some police uniforms come from Horace Small and North Face, affiliates of the largest apparel corporation on the globe, VF Corporation. They don’t list factory locations, but Horace Small participates in W.R.A.P., a non-profit monitoring contractor. (Other affiliates of VF Corp., such as Nautica, are known to have sweatshops in Myanmar, which is a military dictatorship.) Gildan, which makes Class D uniforms for the AFD, is also a W.R.A.P. company, with an anti-sweatshop internal Code of Conduct, and has factories in Mexico, Haiti, and Honduras, the last being a participant in the Fair Labor Association. SanMar has factories across the U.S. and one in Canada, but doesn’t mention anything about unions. Tri-Mountain and Northern Outfitters (which supply bus uniforms) don’t even state their factory locations. Blackinton has made police badges in the USA since 1852, all ‘under one roof,’ and supplies clear evidence of their factory conditions.
If Anchorage citizens want our Assembly to pass a similar ordinance requiring truly ‘sweatfree’ conditions for uniform manufacturers we must address the free trade doctrine of globalization and call upon the U.S. Congress to act. Our national policy of unregulated commerce prevents any attempt by local government to protect international union wages and pensions, enforce adequate sanitation laws, or guarantee that non-union wages are living wages. San Francisco submits to this pressure on page 5 of their Sweatshop Ordinance, when it requires the setting of minimum wage requirement for international workers “adjusted to reflect the country’s level of economic development by using the World Bank’s most recent Gross National Income per capita Purchasing Power Parity Index.” The San Francisco ordinance doesn’t actually address the systemic problems of outsourced, unregulated trade, because it doesn’t question the city and county’s role as a market participant in the procurement process. If we want to address these systemic problems we must support national policies and programs that protect the development of the local private and public sectors from current IMF and World Bank-style structural “growth” reforms, such as Sen. Hilary Clinton’s (D-NY) call for a national auto summit to protect our nation’s machine-tool capability.
Most importantly, the San Francisco ordinance does not adequately address the overall crisis that unregulated trade in futures lending and derivatives is threatening, as warned by Jochen Sanio during the recent “Top Ten Financial Risks to the Global Economy” Conference organized by the Global Markets Institute (Goldman Sachs), and held on Sept. 22, 2005 in New York City.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s original intention for the IMF and related institutions was to aid sovereign nations in developing their own citizenry in the interest of humanity, not to collapse basic economic infrastructure in the interest of Wall Street’s ‘shareholder values.’ If we want to resolve our complicity in the use of sweatshop labor we will have to reject our hedonist monetary culture and revive a humanist culture that sees economy as the servant of man, not the other way around.
Contact Ian Overton at