Here are some facts...Absane said:
This one has plenty of other links:
http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/walmart.htm
Or...
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache...sweatshops+Wal-mart&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=10
How much do sweatshop workers make? Aren’t their wages good enough for their local standards?
Sweatshop workers’ wages fall far below a non-poverty wage that would allow workers to meet very basic needs, such as food, housing, clothing, transportation, education, and healthcare. According to the National Labor Committee, apparel workers in China earn approximately 23 cents an hour, far short of the 87 cents an hour that would allow workers to meet their basic needs. In Haiti, apparel workers make 30 cents an hour while the non-poverty wage is 58 cents an hour. In El Salvador apparel workers make 59 cents an hour while the non-poverty wage is $1.18 an hour. In Honduras, the wage is 43 cents an hour, and the non-poverty wage 79 cents an hour. According to the Center for Reflection, Education and Action (CREA), Mexican maquiladora autoworkers’ purchasing power in Mexico is 90% lower than U.S. auto workers’ purchasing power in the U.S., exposing the myth that “living is cheap in Mexico.”
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Isn’t a sweatshop job better than no job?
Let’s not get trapped in a false “either-or” choice – either sweatshop jobs or none at all. Quite simply, the jobs could and should be better. We are not talking about minor labor code violations, but working conditions so abusive and demeaning they defy imagination.
Workers certainly want jobs. But they don’t want to be physically and verbally abused by supervisors, while working extremely long hours for poverty wages. They don’t want to be forced to choose between starving and being exploited in a sweatshop.
While companies never fail to note the long lines of workers desperate for work, they don’t mention how workers organize and protest, often at great personal risk, to improve conditions. In Mexico, Central America, and the Dominican Republic workers have formed unions in recent years to get respect and dignity at work. In Indonesia, Vietnam, and Cambodia tens of thousands of workers have protested wage violations. Even in China thousands of workers have recently struck over low wages and hazardous work conditions.
In short, it is wrong for large corporations to exploit workers so desperate that they will work in sweatshops. It is never too much to ask for basic human dignity.
Let’s also remember that there is a history of the poverty and desperation of sweatshop workers. Poverty is not a natural state in developing countries, but human-made. The wealthy countries of the world have had a hand in its making over several centuries and also more recently.
According to the United Nations Human Development Reports for 2002 and 2003, extreme poverty and hunger, after decreasing in the 1970s and 1980s, have both been increasing in the 1990s, particularly in countries that have adopted the one-size-fits-all World Trade Organization rules for trade and economic development. (The United Nations argues that policy changes, not charity, are necessary to overcome poverty).
Most sweatshop workers are rural migrants forced off the land by trade policies that require small farmers to sell their products on global markets for below the cost of production. Lee Kyung-Hae, the former President of the Korean Farmers’ League, took his own life as an ultimate protest against WTO rules. Describing the destruction of Korean communities hundreds of years old, he writes:
“Some farmers just gave up farming and migrated to the urban slums. Others became bankrupted through debt. Some fortunate people continued, but not for much longer, I suspect. As for me, I could do nothing but look around their vacant, crumbling houses. I would check them, sometimes, hoping that they had come back. Once I ran to a house where a farmer had abandoned his life by drinking toxic chemicals because of his uncontrollable debts. I could do nothing but listen to the screams of his wife. If you were me, how would you feel?”
Lee was Korean, but could easily be from any point on earth were farmers are being displaced by a flood of cheap freely-traded agricultural products, courtesy of giant agro-businesses.
The point for us is that our large corporations and our administrations have played a significant role creating WTO-style free trade rules that impoverish people around the world . Now large corporations – many U.S.-based and many with a strong voice in the WTO – exploit these same people in sweatshops under the guise of “providing jobs and opportunity.” That is a little like robbing your neighbors of all they have, and, to compensate, offering them work for slave wages.
Sweatshop workers in Honduras, asked by the National Labor Committee if they were better off now than four years ago when they started working, responded: “No, we haven’t gone forward an inch. At best, our living conditions are the same. Nothing has improved.”
