A return to sweatshop days?

By: ROBERT EILEK - For the Californian | Friday, November 14, 2003 9:00 PM PST ∞

Industrial growth during the late 1800s created new jobs and raised the standard of living for many American workers. However, workers paid a heavy price for economic progress, working 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week.

By 1900, corporations employed hundreds of thousands of children under the age of 16 and a million women to work in crowded and unsafe factories. Women were paid half of what men made and children made even less. Workers could be fired at any time for any reason and were often replaced by immigrants who were willing to work 12-hour days, seven days a week and for less pay.

Abused workers organized into labor unions to demand better pay and safe work conditions from employers who refused to address these issues. After a bitter struggle, child labor laws were enacted and workers received better wages, shorter working hours, safer work conditions and the right to bargain collectively with employers.

Fast forward to 2003 and observe some of the same horrors occurring with the Wal-Mart poverty-wage, sweatshop business model which is eerily similar to that which developed in the late 1800s. It is a model that Wal-Mart has fine-tuned with the utmost efficiency. Last year its profits topped $8 billion and S. Robson Walton, one of the ruling members of the Wal-Mart Empire, now ranks as the wealthiest person in the world at $65 billion, according to London's "Rich List 2001."

A series of unsavory business practices has allowed Wal-Mart to rise to the top of the business world. Its average, full-time (40-hour) employee hauls in $15,000 (poverty level) a year while its CEO made a meager $18 million in total compensation last year. And don't be fooled by Wal-Mart's boast that 70 percent of its work force works "full time," since this corporation defines full time as 28 hours per week.

Health-care benefits are only offered after being employed for two years and even then the premiums are so high that most employees cannot afford it and simply choose to do without.

Wal-Mart has a long history of usurping employee rights as evidenced by its many fines for disability and sexual discrimination, child labor law and workers' compensation violations, and its aggressive anti-union posture, which includes intimidation, threats of dismissal, employee surveillance and the dispatching of union busters from its corporate headquarters in Bentonville to any location where there is suspected union activity.

Even more disturbing is Wal-Mart's widespread use of global suppliers to bring down costs and maximize company profits. In one 58-page report titled "Toys of Misery," the National Labor Committee describes sweatshop-like conditions in China's Guangdong Province factory, one of Wal-Mart's toy suppliers.

At this sweatshop, workers are expected to work 13 to 16 hours per day, seven days a week for 13 cents per hour. They are expected to pay for their own medical care and are fired if too sick to report for work. In addition, workers live in 7-foot-by-7-foot squatter shacks or in factory dormitories which they may rent, further depleting their low wages. Finally, there is no health and safety enforcement, thus employees (mostly young women) are exposed to harmful glues, paint thinners, and other solvents used in manufacturing toys.

Wal-Mart executives have a history of denying knowledge of these abuses as demonstrated once again in the recent disclosure that the company's cleaning subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented workers. FBI wiretaps indicate that Wal-Mart executives knew exactly what was occurring.

Thomas Jefferson, our third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, commenting on a farmers' rebellion in 1787, stated that, "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing."

Within that spirit, it is time for the American public to launch its own rebellion against Wal-Mart's domestic and overseas human exploitation by refusing to spend its dollars in their stores until there is a major overhaul of its 1800's era poverty-wage, sweatshop business model. Finally, the federal government needs to continue its aggressive investigation into Wal-Mart's business practices and jail those executives who repeatedly and arrogantly violate the law.

Robert Eilek is a teacher in Temecula.

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