 |
| |
While
we are on the subject of evil... HISTORICAL
EVIL:
"The Triangle Fire," by Leon Stein with a new introduction
by William Greider. (Cornell University Press, 2001.)
EVIL
IN THE RAG TRADE:
"NO SWEAT: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment
Workers," edited by Andrew Ross. (Verso Press 1997.)
BORDERLINE
EVIL:
"Border Witness," by Maureen Casey and Brian Casey. (The New
York State Labor-Religion Coalition, 2002).
COSMIC
EVIL:
"Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy,"
by Susan Neiman. (Princeton U. Press, 2002.)
|
|
|
|
 |
|
> NO SWEAT NEWS >
NEWS ARCHIVE
Jeff Ballinger:
Consumers, Workers, and the Internet
Interviewed by Harvey Blume
Transcribed by Sinikka Jacobson
 |
| As
country program director for the Asian-American
Free Labor Institute in the 1980s, first in Turkey,
then Indonesia, Jeff witnessed the explosion of
sweatshop labor first-hand. |
|
|
Jeff
Ballinger is one of Bienestar's founders, and a recognized leader
in the fight for human rights for workers, especially in the Third
World. He spoke to Harvey Blume about how a corporation like Bienestar
can be an instrument of social change.
HB: Your background is in union work and the anti-sweatshop movement.
Isn't it a bit peculiar that you now are helping to found a corporation?
JB: It comes from frustration. It is certainly the last thing I
thought I would do to address this issue. But I have come to the
conclusion that the problem of contracting work out is
intractable. Corporations will not get the message to their
contractors that they have to reform. I've discovered that businesses
that keep direct control of their production are nowhere near as
exploitative.
HB: But Bienestar, too, will be outsourcing.
JB: That's the challenge. That is exactly the point, to show that
outsourcing *can* be reformed.
HB: In the context of the apparel industry, outsourcing means wherever
union are, corporations go somewhere else?
JB: All you have to do is look at the numbers of shoes and apparel
jobs that left South Korea and Taiwan in the year they democratized
and it is so breathtakingly clear. Wages nearly tripled the first
year, because of unionization and the threat of unionization. So
factories moved to mainland China and Indonesia.
HB:
Obviously unionization is not in the cards in China now. Can you
summarize the situation in Indonesia?
JB: Go back 13 years, 14 years to when changes came to South Korean
and Taiwan. Indonesia had Suharto, a military-backed dictator very
hostile to unions. Wages were 86 cents a day and there was
stability. Stability was the watchword for the international
investment community back then. Stability meant that Suharto and
the
military were in such complete control that it wasn't likely that
any
South Korean or Taiwanese kind of revolution could upend things.
HB: That turned out not to be so.
JB: For a decade, until Suharto was overthrown in 1998, it was so.
HB: And now Suharto is gone. Are unions setting up shop?
JB: They are trying. The problem is, the government. Take Abdurrahman
Wahid, who succeeded Suharto, and really was a democrat and a human
rights activist. Even *he* would denounce unionization. Even this
guy who got into office based on his reputation for defending human
rights and free expression made a speech in New York to potential
investors saying, don't worry about unions. The reality is, there
are very, very few multinational firms that choose to deal with
unions.
Strangely enough, it's Francis Fukuyama, the neo-liberal economist
[best known for "The End of History and the Last Man,"
(1992)] who
best explains why unions are necessary in the apparel trade. In
his
book, "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity,"
(1995) he focuses mainly on high skilled industries and how important
it is for people to share information so that business can work
in the
new economy. But there are several pages where he talks about the
other end of the spectrum -- industries where the Taylorist model
of
production still prevails, and everything is broken down to very
small
tasks. For example, in a Taylorist factory, you sew only a shoulder
seam and then pass the piece on to the next person. Fukuyama says
that in such situations, you have to have a union. The boss has
so much control over you that the only hope for balancing things
out is a
union.
HB: So, for you, in a way, in Bienestar is an approach to effecting
social change. It's pro-union corporation in a field where there
are
few.
 |
| Ballinger
wrote the first expose on Nike's labor practices
in Harpers, 1992, igniting the outrage over the
big brand's "sweatshop" contractors. |
|
|
JB: That's certainly part of it. I don't think you can have the
kind
of experience I had in Asia and not come back with a lot of questions
that you want answers to. How can workers be convinced that it is
not
a hopeless situation?
HB: I've heard you say the climate of opinion surrounding the
anti-sweat shop movement changed for the worse around 1998-99. For
one thing, the Seattle anti-WTO protests were in 1999.
JB: The media frame shifted significantly around then. There was
the
Seattle protest, as you say, and also the fact that Clinton lost
the
fight for Fast Track. That was an earth-shattering development for
the
Southern democrats and the conservative democrats who thought they
were going to have their way with the Congress on the trade
issue. This really woke them up to the fact that the American people
were not altogether happy with the free-trade philosophy.
Fast Track would have allowed the president to negotiate without
Congress going back to Congress over every detail in the trade
agreement. It meant that the executive branch would have had almost
final say on trade. That, and the Seattle protests, made editors
who
had been very sympathetic to the struggle of sweatshop workers in
the
early and mid 90's, rethink the issue. Activists, like myself, had
been viewed as human rights workers for telling the story of these
embattled workers. At worst, we were seen as benign do-gooders.
Almost overnight, the view changed. We were suddenly dangerous people,
against globalization and opposed to investment in foreign
countries. Which has never been the case.
HB: The movement against globalization gave the anti-sweat movement
a bad name?
JB: I think it was a mischaracterization of the movement for fair
trade and for environmental protection to construe it as
anti-globalist. I know some people in the anti-WTO crowd do think
of
themselves this way. But if you really look at what you are doing,
if
you care about people in other countries, you cannot be
anti-globalist.
HB: So it's not just a media presumption. There really is a split
in
the movement.
JB: I'll accept that. I know there are people, especially in textiles,
who are just protectionist -- end of story. They would oppose NAFTA
and other agreements purely because they are just looking after
their
own interests. In other words, there are people opposed to trade
agreements who are not on the same side of the human rights issues
that the anti sweatshop community is.
HB: Let's get back to outsourcing for a minute. In the digital world,
outsourcing is related to the open-source movement in that it opens
problems up to a large number of people. It enlists a lot of
intelligence. It is in some ways a democratic move. Certainly that's
so of open source. But in the world of apparel, outsourcing pretty
much means exploitation.
JB: You can blame that on the Harvard Business School. They did
a Nike study about 15 years ago, and were just gaga over the idea
of
outsourcing. What a smart guy Phil Knight, the head of Nike's is,
they
said. He has held onto the interesting parts of the business, such
as
design and marketing, and has farmed out the dirty stuff.
My question is, why couldn't anybody see at the time that as they
were
losing direct control of manufacturing, it was migrating to the
most
repressive places in the world?. Didn't they see the train wreck
coming? But nobody at Harvard Business School saw it. They kept
singing the praises of Phil Knight, pumping him up so that when
the
anti-sweat shop movement first confronted Nike, his response was,
Well, you people must be flatlanders, you must be throwbacks.
HB: That was part of the shift to the new economy, wasn't it? It
was
much more interesting to talk about anything but old industrial
stuff,
the plain process of actually making things.
JB:
That's part of it, certainly. So Knight never saw the danger of
shoes going for seventy-dollar on average with less than a dollar
in
labor cost. He never saw that coming around to bite them on the
ass.
HB: Which it has.
JB: Absolutely. What's been lost, unfortunately, is the story of
these
brave young women who took these awful Nike contractors on, and
won, against incredible odds in Indonesia. Even in the early accounts
of
the anti sweatshop movement it was easy to forget about them and
put
the focus on people like me, who were supposedly saying: Oh isn't
it
so awful what is going on over there? That was never my message.
My
message was: Isn't it great that these young women are taking it
to
these Korean and Taiwanese contractors and organizing protest!?
The Nike response has been to set up listening posts in different
countries to monitor abuses. But that, too, takes the focus off
the
worker's themselves, and puts it on Nike.
HB: Anything useful come of these listening posts?
JB: Well, of course, when you decide not to use a chemical that
has
been poisoning workers for decades, that is a positive development.
When you are exposed on the front page of the New York
Times you can't very well continue in the same vein, can you?
HB: Bienestar, like the anti-sweatshop movement, wants to highlight
the workers. It wants consumers to make decisions about what to
buy
based on working conditions and on whether workers are actually
engaged in collective bargaining.
JB: If you unpack it, it's really not so hard to understand the
movement to inform consumers: It's overwhelmingly because of the
Internet. Think of Jonah Peretti, the MIT student who wanted to
customize his Nike sneakers to say "sweatshop" on them.
E-mail about that went around the world several times in a week.
Literally millions of people saw it.
That couldn't have happened if Nike didn't have an Internet-based
marketing approach where they were going to give people the ability
to
design their own shoes. Peretti's idea would never have flown in
a
non-digital world. I mean, he's not even an activist, he is just
a
concerned citizen. He slaps them digitally and it reverberates
globally until print media picks it up.
HB: You are not going to beat Nike on television, you can't compete
for ad space. But you can compete online.
JB: That's right, somebody counted a million anti-Nike pages on
the
Web. A million. It may be just a bit of an exaggeration but it is
not
far from true.
HB: Bienestar is going to outsource to union shops and only union
shops, here and in the Third world. You think the kind of consumer
sentiment that worked against Nike is going to work for a firm like
Bienestar?
JB: Absolutely. Most important, I think that Bienestar will end
up
subsidizing some things that I've been frustrated about not being
able
to do as an activist. Our Web site will tell consumers exactly what's
going on in Costa Rica or China or Indonesia so far as garment workers
are concerned. This is my dream.
HB: So digital media motivates you in this project as much as the
actual production of apparel.
JB: Absolutely. The anti sweatshop movement, at least the way I
started with it, was just to pass along information from the producing
areas. And that is what I still think is the most empowering thing
for
consumers. When you empower consumers with information, you are
empowering these folks over there.
Let me give you an example. The chief Harvard lawyer, their
point-person on this issue, called me in about three years
ago. "Jeff," he said, "can you sketch out for me
what's going on out
here?"
I told him they should leverage the institution's great power as
a
learning institution. I advised him to start a Web site that would
encourage the inquisitiveness of the student body, where they could
post anything relevant about working conditions in Costa Rica, say,
or
Vietnam. That way, if something is wrong, people are going to point
it
out.
You know what they did, instead?
HB: Tell me
JB: They hired Price, Waterhouse, Coopers, to go around to some
of the places where they are outsourcing Harvard coffee mugs, and
t-shirts
and such. Then they hired an MIT professor to go around and critique
the methodology of Price, Waterhouse, Coopers.
Harvard could have made a such a much bigger contribution to solving
the problem by doing what I described. They didn't do it. We
will. That's what I think this organization is about.
|
{picmid} |
