The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [46]
At last my T-shirt is ready to be born, and the finished cotton fabric is shipped off to the factory where this will happen. This is the stage we’ve heard the most about, on account of all the bad press that sweatshops have received. Sadly, despite the attention, the conditions for most garment workers are still horrendous. Many big brand clothing companies tend to seek out factories that pay the absolute lowest wages. Today this means places like Bangladesh and the “special economic zones” or “export processing zones” of China, where workers—squeezed into underlit, underventilated, deafening factories to perform mind-numbing, repetitive drudgery, sometimes for eleven hours a day—receive wages as low as ten to thirteen cents per hour.27 Free speech and the right to form a trade union are routinely repressed as well. Child labor, though officially outlawed pretty much everywhere, still exists in shadowy pockets, most often employed when deadlines are tight.
When I visited Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1990, I met with women who worked in sweatshops making clothing for Disney. This was six years before the New York–based National Labor Committee released its 1996 film Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti, exposing the hardships these workers face, but the plight of garment workers was already getting international attention and some of the women were nervous about speaking freely. Others weren’t shy, hoping their stories would be heard by people like me who might be able to shift Disney’s practices. Least shy of all was Yannick Etienne, the firebrand organizer from Batay Ouvriye (“Workers Fight”), who facilitated the meeting and translated the women’s stories.
In the Haitian heat, we crowded into a tiny room inside a small cinder-block house. We had to keep the windows shuttered for fear that someone might see the workers speaking to us. These women worked day in and day out, sewing Disney apparel that they could never save enough to buy. Those lucky enough to be paid minimum wage earned about fifteen dollars a week for a six-day workweek, eight hours per day. Some of their overseers refused to pay minimum wage unless a certain number of garments were completed each shift. The women described the grueling pressure at work, routine sexual harassment, and other unsafe and demeaning conditions. Through international allies in the workers rights movement, they had learned that Disney’s CEO Michael Eisner made millions. In the year that Mickey Mouse Goes to Haiti was released—1996—he made $8.7 million in salary plus $181 million in stock options, which comes out to $101,000 an hour.28 In contrast, these women were paid half of 1 percent of the sales price of the garment in the United States.
Yet even with the horrible working conditions and starvation wages, the women feared losing their jobs, because they had no other opportunities. One told me that working for Disney allowed them to starve slowly, which was better than a quick starvation. The women wanted fair pay for a fair day’s work. They wanted us to use our voice as U.S. consumers and citizens to pressure Disney into improving the wages and living conditions for the workers, so they could have a healthy, decent life. They wanted to be safe, be able to drink water when hot, and to be free from sexual harassment. The mothers wanted to come home early enough to see their children before bedtime and to have enough food to feed them a solid meal when they woke. Since that visit, I’ve never been able to look at Disney products without thinking of the women of Port-Au-Prince.
In August 2009, Etienne e-mailed me to say, “The working conditions have not changed much in the industrial park in PauP [Port au Prince]. We are still fighting for the same changes and now the battle for an increase of the minimum wage is waging fiercely.”29 It’s been nineteen years since I first met the determined organizer and she is still fighting for worker rights in Haiti. In August 2009, the Haitian government did increase