The image on the cover of this pamphlet
In Mexico, many workers have unions, and Mexico has many labor law provisions that should protect workers. However, many of these laws are not enforced, and when workers try to organize, call a strike, or walkout, they are met with a militarized police force to break any disruption. Also, it has become common for workers to attempt to unionize, only to be told that they already have a union—a "yellow union"—like the young women on the front page of this pamphlet. Yellow unions disgrace the word union, because they are unions organized from above, by and for the bosses. Managers control them as a means to regiment the workers.
This provides us with a premise to ask: What criteria can we use to define sweatshops? If unions, the building block for workers' power, contain sweatshop labor, they cannot be the only criteria by which we measure workers' rights.
The General Accounting Office states, "We define a sweatshop as an employer that violates more than one federal or state labor law governing minimum wage and overtime, child labor, industrial homework, occupational safety and health, workers' compensation, or industry registration." The Department of Labor, defines sweatshops as any workplace that violates two or more basic labor laws. As a result of this definition, the Dept. of Labor has concluded that 67% of the Los Angeles textile industry conducts "sweatshop" labor. The GAO warns that we do not have the resources to monitor the growing amount of low-wage labor to effectively measure how many sweatshops really exist in the U.S., but that sweatshops are much more pervasive in the U.S. than any of our statistics reveal.
United Students Against Sweatshops, on the other hand, defines sweatshops by a more objective criteria, because we realize that laws are very flexible in the courtroom and are always changing. Instead, we claim.
Sweatshop conditions exist in the fields, in the prisons, on our campuses, in the power relations of a flawed global system. Thus, we consider all struggles for a better world and an alternative to the current structure of the global economy to be directly or by analogy a struggle against sweatshops.
We claim that any workplace that violates current gains workers have made through reforms is a sweatshop, like the GAO. But we also, include any workplace that does not pay a living wage, does not have a proven worker representative body, or contains sexism, racism, heterosexism, classism, or other prejudices, is a "sweatshop". This draws a line and allows us to more consistently make a claim about objective conditions that we cannot compromise. It allows us to defend our gains of yesterday and work more objectively forward to a better tomorrow for workers around the world.
What implications does our more objective definition of "sweatshop" have?
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- A sweatshop can legally discriminate based upon sexual preferences in thirty-nine states in the U.S.
- A sweatshop can have sham "workers’" organizations, like at the Kuk-Dong factory in Mexico (on the front of this pamphlet), which intentionally misrepresents workers’ interests through top-down manipulation of the union.
- A sweatshop may not have democratically voted (without intimidation) on the representative voice of its workers.
- A sweatshop may not pay a living wage.
- A sweatshop may pay workers unequally for equal work.
Yes, this broadens our definition of sweatshops, but it refines it to include universal standards that cannot be manipulated through bosses or the variations and curbing of government definitions. Altogether, USAS has created a more consistently accurate and objective definition of a "sweatshop", than any other organization to date.
End Notes:
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- Report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer and Monetary Affairs, Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, "Garment Industry: Efforts to Address the Prevalence and Conditions of Sweatshops," General Accounting Office, (Washington, D.C.: GAO, 1994), p. 1.
- Southern California Garment Compliance Survey Fact Sheet, U.S. Department of Labor (Washington, D.C.: August 2000).
- See "About USAS at USAS’s website:
- The U.S. Supreme Court has determined that indefinite instances of whether or not workers have a union (for example, when the NLRB processes workers’ voting cards to legally acknowledge a union), the only legally safe assumption to make is that workers do want a union. See National Labor Relations Board v. Gissel Packing Co., Inc., 395 U.S.S.C. 575 (1969). It is still, however, inconsistent and inaccurate to hold the assumption that workers who have not demanded a vote through the NLRB do not want a union.
On the contrary, USAS contends that the only consistently safe and accurate assumption is that any decision making body that has not been voted on in a workplace, is not representative of the workers. And, until workers have democratically voted (without intimidation) on their representation, their voice for (or to remain against) a union has been unheard. Thus, the only practical assumption is that workers without representative bodies have not been permitted representation.
If the WRC ever finds a case where workers have democratically voted without intimidation to not have a union, then, USAS would acknowledge the company’s body as the workers’ representation; however, this has never occurred in the hundreds of WRC Factory Reports. We are confident in the mountains of Factory Reports that this assumption proves to be consistently accurate in determining worker representation, thus adding to our objective definition of sweatshops—both factors are vast improvements upon the "sweatshop" definitions put forth by popular media, the Dept. of Labor, the GAO, or any other organization to date.
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