Program fights for fair trade in Flag
Sasha Solomonov - November 9th, 2007
A T-shirt bought for $10 may seem like a bargain, but who is really getting ripped off? Not the multi-billion dollar corporation.
Keith Sherman, political science graduate student, and Ryan Conrad, education graduate student, are taking action with the city council to encourage a resolution that would team Flagstaff with a consortium of more than 180 SweatFree communities.
The resolution would effectively ban municipal purchases of garments fashioned in sweatshop factories.
Sherman said the city of Flagstaff would only spend 1 percent of their procurement budget, the money spent on garments for the year, to join the consortium.
The money from all the communities is then used to fund professional monitoring groups that inspect factories that are prospective suppliers to the cities.
“Any prospective suppliers of uniforms or other products that the city might use would have to establish to the consortium that their factories meet the standards that are set forth by the international labor organization,” Sherman said.
The resolution would not affect private consumerism, only those purchases made by the city such as police and fire department worker uniforms.
Conrad said it is easy to ignore where garments come from because Americans rarely see sweatshops or the labor conditions of the workers in the factories of developing or underdeveloped countries.
“When you go beyond statistics and start looking at the lives of people, you see there’s definitely a grave powerful injustice going on that you can’t ignore,” Conrad said
Conrad said apparel sweatshop conditions are most inhumane, with temperatures of more than 100 degrees in factories, forced overtime, unsanitary bathroom facilities, regulated bathroom and water breaks, and discrepancies between time worked and time paid for, among others.
These factories maintain traditional gender roles. Women are the predominate workers in factories because they are more easily controlled by threats and physical abuse.
The factories are structured with men employed as foremen and women as the operators.
Child labor was outlawed in the United States almost 70 years ago, but many of the sweatshops owned by American companies employ girls in their early teenage years.
Last month, the Women and Gender Studies department, directed by Frances Riemer, showed “Maquilapolis,” city of factories, and brought Cecilia Santiago Vera, a social psychologist from Chiapas, Mexico, to help students understand the reality of people affected by free trade.
“Free trade privileges large multi-national companies to buy raw materials and manufacture goods at low prices and sell them at high prices, which is unfair to the producers,” Riemer said.
Vera described the effects of free trade to the producers in Mexico during her presentation at Cline Library.
“There is a very clear hegemonic ideology that perverts the people into two different groups: those who control the money who are in the political class, and the rest of the people who are left with nothing,” Vera said.
Vera brought clothing and handbags from the Women’s Handicraft Cooperative for Dignity, a self-sustained group of women in Mexico who weave and sell their goods through resistance to free trade.
Riemer said it is difficult to overthrow a system that is already in place, such as fair trade, with a structure that is reliant on human-to-human interaction.
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Labor from Page 5
“Cecilia literally put textiles from the women’s coop into her trunk and drove them here,” Riemer said.
Sherman and Conrad can attest to this difficulty after hearings upon hearings before the city council and little-to-no support from the members.
“I do think that Flagstaff has a pretty progressive community,” Conrad said.
Conrad said the people of the city of Flagstaff would want to work toward fixing the sweatshop issues and is ready to resubmit the idea to city council again.
“I’m not sure how reflective of that the council is, but I think within this community people don’t want their taxpayer dollars being used to support these kinds of labor conditions,” Conrad said.
Sherman and Conrad have decided to research Flagstaff’s contribution to sweatshop sustainability and rally support from community members before appearing before the council again.
“We’re going to have to make a compelling case to the council, A: that our money is being used in these ways and we can prove it, and B: that there is a widespread interest in stopping these kinds of spending with their taxpayer money,” Conrad said.
For more information on SweatFree communities, visit www.sweatfree.org.