CLR Newsletter #1

July-August 1996 -- Web Edition

In this issue:

• Nike campaign accelerates. With leafleting scheduled in at least 10 cities this month, and sometimes multiple events in the same city, CLR and partner organization Press for Change are taking this struggle to the grassroots.

• Nike campaign sidebar. Trailmobile workers win their struggle with owners linked to the Indonesian military government.

• Nicaragua maquiladora campaign. Still on hold pending selection of focal corporation. Coming soon!

• Starbucks update.

• Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. CISPES takes on U.S. Agency for International Development (US/AID) -- and Citibank.

• Disney in Haiti. National Labor Committee continues to advocate for justice in the sweatshops of Haiti.

• Wal-mart: Update and analysis

• Labor Defense Network. Soren Ambrose reports on recent developments with the Central America labor emergency response network.

Nike Campaign: expanded focus and increasing energy

An affiliate of Press for Change, "Justice: Do it, Nike!" in Portland, Oregon has a solid core of activists leafleting their local Nike Town 1-2 times every week.

Recent developments:
On March 16, the New York Times carried a story on a Nike factory in Indonesia, where workers were fired after organizing for better wages. One of them was "locked in a room at the plant and interrogated for seven days by the military, which demanded to know more about his labor activities." A Canadian human rights organization, Development and Peace, offered to train local human rights workers to monitor conditions and to verify Nike's own "Code of Conduct" at Nike-contracted facilities. Nike contemptuously refused. The group then collected 86,500 signatures on a petition to Nike.

The United Methodist Church submitted an unprecedented shareholder resolution to be voted on at the September 16 Nike annual meeting, asking for independent monitoring of Nike factories.

The June issue of LIFE Magazine carried an article by Sydney Schanberg (author of The Killing Fields) describing child labor in Pakistan, where children make 60 cents per day stitching together Nike soccer balls.

And -- the incident that suddenly made Nike frontpage news - - television hostess Kathie Lee Gifford, recently a convert to labor rights, called upon other celebrities to take responsibility for the conditions under which products associated with their name are manufactured. She specifically cited Nike's icon Michael Jordan.

Seizing the Time

When we set out to organize leafleting on such short notice, our goal was to get the participation of a minimum of five cities. In fact, there now are at least 10 cities on board, some with multiple events. Four of the events will be at Nike Towns, with Frontlash, the youth wing of the AFL-CIO, doing the principle organizing. One event will be in front of Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon (near Portland). Others will be at Foot Locker stores. (Foot Locker is Nike's major outlet.) At least one Canadian city will be participating. Events begin on July 13 and continue in one location or another through most of the month.

The demands of the campaign are for Nike to:

• pay workers in Nike production facilities a living wage,
  
• allow independent monitoring of production facilities,
  
• respect the right to organize for better wages and working conditions; end military suppression of union activities, and
  
• stop using child labor.

Planning Ahead

Trailmobile union victory

Charleston, Ill.--Union members locked out for five months at Trailmobile Corp. here ratified a new contract which turns back all company demands for concessions and makes new gains in wages and other contract improvements. By a margin of 70%, the members of United Paperworkers (UPIU) Local 7591 yesterday approved a new three-year pact which will end the lockout and marks a decisive victory against Trailmobile's demands for severe rollbacks in the 1200 workers' standard of living.

"The unity of Trailmobile workers in Charleston, coupled with the UPIU's strategic campaign against the company's owners, has proven that union workers can stand up to corporate greed and win," said Local 7591 president Gary Collins. The contract settlement came three weeks to the day after Trailmobile workers decisively rejected the company's previous, concession-ridden offer, and caps off an international campaign by the UPIU and Local 7591 against Trailmobile's Indonesian parent company, the Gemala Group...

The pact also drops the company's demand that the local union formally "apologize" to Trailmobile owner Edward Wanandi for the union's campaign linking the Wanandi family to Indonesian military atrocities in the occupied nation of East Timor. Throughout the lockout, Trailmobile denied it was controlled by the Gemala Group, a privately-held Indonesian conglomerate with long-standing ties to that country's brutal armed forces. UPIU research demonstrated that Trailmobile was indeed controlled by Gemala and the Wanandi family, which has amassed a vast fortune through its association with key Indonesian generals.

The UPIU's campaign featured actions throughout the United States, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and Canada, where the Wanandis also have business interests. Immediately following the contract rejection in June, the union staged simultaneous protests June 19 at the Indonesian embassies in the U.S. and Australia to highlight Gemala's close ties to the Indonesian dictatorship. The union also organized teams of locked- out workers to distribute leaflets detailing the Gemala Group's sordid history at a series of trucking industry trade shows. Trailmobile managers publicly complained that the union's campaign had driven off customer orders from the beleaguered firm.

[CLR editor's note: Nike subcontractors in Indonesia rely on the military to suppress labor organizing--even admitting this when pressed by reporters.]

An action you can take as an individual: Don't appreciate Nike using child labor or firing workers for trying to organize a union? Call Nike at 1-800-344-6453, press 3, and then 1 to leave a voicemail message.

Nike campaign action packets

2) the organizer's packet, with:
Master for a two-sided halfpage leaflet
Press release Suggestions for event organizers
Sample rap and guidelines for leafleters
Talking points/frequently asked questions

These packets were put together for the current round of events in July. They (and all our action packets) are available free of charge to CLR members, whether you want to organize something for this month on VERY short notice or whether you want to plan ahead for future events. For those wishing to receive the Press for Change newsletter, "Nike in Indonesia," the address is: P.O. Box 230, Bayonne, NJ 07002. Subscriptions are $20 for 6 issues -- free to teachers.

Nicaragua Maquiladora Campaign - almost ready

When we have a corporate focus, we will alert you immediately with another CLR newsletter. Friends of labor rights in Nicaragua: Please be ready to respond on short notice!!!

Starbucks update

"As you know, it has been almost eight months since Starbucks publicly released their code of conduct. In this time, Starbucks has continued to receive praise from many quarters for their innovative efforts....However, as far as we can determine, the company has to date taken virtually no actual steps towards implementation or enforcement of its code. Even its effort to undertake a survey of working conditions has apparently not yet gotten off the ground.

"Given Starbucks' disturbingly slow pace, we are planning to ask several key groups...to join us in asking for a meeting with Starbucks this summer to obtain a progress report and to push for faster implementation, lest our faith in their commitment to the code be seriously jeopardized. If Starbucks fails to move forward at an acceptable pace, we will begin asking you for grassroots support to pressure Starbucks, as you did so persuasively at the beginning of this campaign. We stand by our commitment to supporting real, measurable progress in working conditions for coffee workers in Guatemala and we will not be satisfied with a merely symbolic gesture on Starbucks' part."

There is more to victory in a labor rights campaign than getting signatures on paper. Grassroots groups need to continue pressuring corporations for full implementation. Campaign for Labor Rights will alert our members if GLEP issues a call for action to ensure compliance from Starbucks.

U.S./GLEP's newsletter and update Would you like to know more about U.S./GLEP's Starbucks campaign and their other efforts on behalf of labor rights in Central America? To receive their newsletter and updates, contact:

U.S./GLEP,
P.O. Box 268-290,
Chicago, IL 60626
(312) 262-6502
usglep@igc.apc.org

About this newsletter

We are not putting the CLR newsletter on a regular timetable. We prefer flexibility, to be able to respond as important new campaigns arise and as major developments occur in existing campaigns. Unscheduled or not, expect to hear from us several times throughout the year. And ALWAYS feel welcome to contact us when you need information or other assistance.

Given the likelihood that a second newsletter will follow soon on the heels of this, we have chosen to make our first edition less than encyclopedic. Campaigns and organizations not mentioned in newsletter #1 may well appear in #2, and vice versa. We hope that you find this and other editions of the newsletter useful and interesting. If so, please tell your friends about us.

Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador

CISPES takes on AID --and Citibank--

Context:

As CISPES notes, selling off ANTEL is the first step toward privatization in El Salvador. It sets the stage for the rest of the process. ANTEL is crucial to the Salvadoran right (for lining their own pockets) and for continuing to open El Salvador to the control of international capital.

Citibank and Morgan-Stanley recently won the bid to help sell ANTEL. Citibank also is involved in busting unions here at home and is the focus of a campaign by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) supports privatization of ANTEL and is providing technical assistance for the process -- with our tax dollars! (See the accompanying postcard to AID.)

Dear Sir,
AID has spent tax $ building Free Trade Zones in El Salvador where labor laws are not enforced and a host of inhuman labor practices occur. AID is now building an Industrial Park, which I understand is simular to the Free Trade Zone, but without the tax breaks. However, AID is not doing enough to ensure labor laws are enforced.

AID is also using tax $ to support the privatization of the El Salvador telecommunications company, ANTEL. In order to neutralize opposition to these moves the Salvadoran government has illegally fired workers and used riot police to attack peaceful demonstrators. Privatization of ANTEL will likely result in higher rates for services and lower wages for workers. I do not want my tax dollars spent in this way.

• I urge you to condition US assistance on full funding for the Salvadoran Ministry of Labor and on allowing independent monitors to enter any factories built with US tax dollars,
  
• I urge you to cease all support and funding for the privatization of ANTEL.
  

Name:

Address:

CISPES action packet:

• a postcard to Citibank,
  
• background materials, and
  
• "Sweatgear," a mock holiday catalog laying out the political economy behind the bargain clothing in our stores -- a great organizing tool and consciousness raiser!

National Labor Committee update

The following selections are from a 12-page letter which NLC Director Charles Kernaghan sent to Disney CEO Michael Eisner. The letter recounts findings from an NLC follow-up trip to Haiti in late April:

"...I had the opportunity to visit the home of a Disney worker who lived in the Delmars neighborhood of Port-au-Prince....Her home was typical of those of other Disney employees. She was a single mother with four young children. They lived in a one-room windowless shack, 8 by 11 feet wide, lit by one bare lightbulb and with a tin roof that leaked. The room contained: one table, three straight-back chairs and two small beds. This is all the room would fit. I counted four drinking glasses and three plastic plates. There was no fan, no TV, no radio, no toys, no refrigerator, no stove, no running water. She had to buy water by the bucket and carry it home. The toilet was a hole in the ground, shared with ten other families. The children were 3 1/2, 8, 11and 14 years old. They were very small for their age....One child had malaria, another a painful dysentery, but their mother was unable to afford the medicines, so they had to go without and simply bear it....Before leaving, I asked the family what they would eat that night. `Nothing,' they responded. There was no food. For this family, there were many days when they could not afford to eat. Instead of eating, they would just go to bed. The mother slept in one small bed, the daughters in the other, while the two boys slept on the ground under the table. No one in this home had ever seen a Disney movie. The mother had years of experience as a sewer. The production quota set at [the Disney clothing factory] is excessively high. On her assembly line, working furiously under constant pressure, she handled 375 Pocahontas shirts an hour -- shirts which sell at Wal-Mart for $10.97 each. Yet her average weekly wage was only $10.77! She earned the minimum wage of 28 cents an hour. No one can survive on 28 cent-an-hour wages -- even in Haiti, which is not a cheap place to live. Seventy percent of what Haiti consumes is imported, including basic staples like rice, beans and corn meal. Food can actually be as expensive in Haiti as in the U.S. Workers producing Disney garments in Haiti are thin and tired looking. They and their families are always at the edge of hunger, sinking ever deeper into depth and misery. Far from being the exception. this woman's life and her story are typical."

"The workers also told us the plant is hot, dusty and poorly lit. Some complained about having trouble with their eyesight and respiratory problems. According to the workers, the production quotas and piece rate the company sets are impossible to reach. Supervisors put enormous, constant pressure on the workers to go faster. Supervisors yell, scream, threaten and curse the workers....If you are young and pretty and a supervisor wants you as his mistress, you either give in to him or you are fired....The toilets are filthy. Rats are everywhere. The holding tank for drinking water is covered only with a light piece of metal, which the rats have no trouble getting under. In the last week of April, the...workers told us, rats that had been poisoned were floating in the water tank. If you dared speak up, to complain to...management about these conditions or about the pay scale, you would be fired, period. Every worker we spoke with told us that if the company even suspected that they were interested in organizing to claim their rights, they would be thrown out of the factory immediately."

"Prior to leaving for Haiti, I went to a Wal-mart store on Long Island and purchased several Disney garments which had been made in Haiti. I showed these to the crowd of workers, who immediately recognized the clothing they had made. Everyone pointed to the parts of the shirt that they had sewed while explaining what the quota was for those operations. I asked the...workers if they had any idea what these shirts -- the ones they had made -- sell for in the U.S. I held up a size 4 Pocahontas t- shirt. I showed them the Wal-Mart price tag indicating $10.97. But it was only when I translated the $10.97 into the local currency...that, all at once, in unison, the workers screamed with shock, disbelief, anger and a mixture of pain and sadness, as their eyes remained fixed on the Pocahontas shirt. People kept yelling, excited. They simply could not believe what they had heard. In a single day, they worked on hundreds of Disney shirts. Yet the sales price of just one shirt in the U.S. amounted to nearly 5 days of their wages!"

"...Haitian workers are not receiving any assistance or support from the U.S. Embassy. In a February 1996 cable to the State Department in Washington, D.C...., the U.S. Embassy in Port-au- Prince reports that in the maquila plants producing under contract for U.S. companies, the average pay is 46 cents an hour and not the 28 cents an hour (or even less) that the National Labor Committee documented. The Embassy's cable notes that a 'greater analysis of the Group's [The National Labor Committee] charges will follow.' But how did the Embassy reach its conclusions? The Embassy simply sent out a questionnaire to the maquila factory owners and waited for them to mail back their responses! This, of course, is ridiculous in a country like Haiti, where the tiny elite which controls these factories has an unparalleled record for corruption, tax evasion, cheating on bills owed to the state electrical, phone and port agencies, and massive violations of the internationally recognized rights of their employees. All of this is done with total impunity. In the case of the U.S. Embassy, its 'research' is virtually useless, as well as harmful to the people of Haiti, and should be challenged until the record is set straight."

Wal-Mart Update:

The media attention given to the Gifford brouhaha brought the issue of labor rights into the national spotlight, to a degree unprecedented in recent times. We are seeing a level of public interest in this subject which none of could have imagined a few months ago. Gifford's mention of Michael Jordan as a celebrity who ought to take responsibility for his product endorsements suddenly made the Nike campaign a frontburner issue. It was tempting, then, following Gifford's chiding of Wal-Mart, to consider taking on that corporate giant -- all the more so given Wal-Mart's reputation as a destroyer of small-town businesses and quality of life.

Words of caution are in order. First, Wal-Mart strength is formidable. The corporation is said to be the fourth largest in the U.S. and the world's largest retailer. At $93 billion a year, its gross revenues make The Gap look like small potatoes. Many question whether the labor rights movement is prepared to take on such a campaign at this time.

Wal-Mart claims that the threat of termination acts as a powerful incentive to subcontractors to keep their factories free of violations. While there is some kernel of truth to that claim, the net effect of Wal-Mart's policy is to make workers fearful of organizing for their rights. Not only do they have to fear what maquiladora organizers everywhere face -- firing of unionists -- but also they could cause a flight by Wal-Mart. So, the threat functions more as a suppressor of organizing than as an incentive to subcontractors.

Wal-Mart cannot claim the high moral ground on this point. The real motivation for their cut-and-run policy is to avoid negative publicity. Wal-Mart knows that its purchasing practices require worker exploitation. Wal-Mart and the other major players in the clothing retail business set prices to contractors so low that subcontractors have no option but to use sweatshops.

It was good that Wal-Mart's practices suffered a degree of public exposure. The company has earned its recent negative publicity. At a later time, following victories by somewhat smaller players in retail clothing, the labor rights movement might realistically undertake a major campaign around Wal-Mart. In the meantime, it's worth raising public awareness about the plight of their production workers -- in general terms, so as not to cause a pullout from any particular factory. However, until we see that we can mount a major campaign around Wal-Mart without recklessly endangering workers' jobs, Campaign for Labor Rights will not advise members to focus on Wal-Mart. In any case, we will not undertake a campaign around Wal-Mart or any other company unless we have a request from the affected workers to do so. That is a central premise of solidarity work.

[Editor's note: Stephen Coats, of U.S./GLEP, deserves the credit for most of the information and analysis that went into this update -- but none of the blame for its errors.]

Labor Defense Network

by Soren Ambrose

The LDN has been on the front lines in the fight against the human rights abuses that labor activists in Central America are particularly vulnerable to. We mobilize members in cases of violence against workers, lock- outs, imprisonments, mass layoffs and legislative efforts to restrict workers' rights or to reduce job security and benefits.

Our weapon is the force of North American public opinion -- a force felt keenly by Latin American governments. Simply signaling that international attention is focused on governmental actions is often sufficient to prevent serious abuses. In other cases, public pressure can result in the reversal of an imprisonment or illegal lock-out.

When one of our partner organizations (such as CISPES and its affiliate Centro Internacional de la Solidaridad, the U.S./ Guatemala Labor Education Project, and the Centro Nicaraguense de los Derechos Humanos (CENIDH]) informs us of human rights abuses stemming from labor activity, we mobilize by rushing letters, in Spanish, to government officials or corporate executives within 24 hours. Each letter is sent in the name of a different member of the LDN. Our staff allots these names according to our records of paid-in-advance memberships and members who prefer to be billed after each message is sent. Notification of actions taken in our members' names occurs through URGENT ACTION, the new monthly newsletter of the Latin America Emergency Response Network.

Many of our alerts involve disputes in the region's maquilas, the assembly plants in "free trade zones" that produce goods for export to the U.S. and other richer countries. Examples of other actions by the LABOR DEFENSE NETWORK illustrate the breadth of our activity:

• In Nicaragua, the former part-owner and manager of La Fosforera match factory illegally regained control of the facility from its worker- owners and proceeded to fire and remove them with the complicity of the police. He was finally convicted on fraud charges last August. In April, 35 deputies in the National Assembly announced support for his petition for a pardon. LDN members wrote to Cairo Manuel Lopez, President of the National Assembly, opposing the blatant double-standard evident in this potential misappli- cation of justice.

• In Guatemala, the LDN followed up on a March alert by other components of the Latin America Emergency Response Network, which had protested to the Guatemalan government when Vilma Cristina gonzalez, sister of labor leader Reynaldo Gonzalez, was abducted, raped, and tortured. She was told that if her brother did not cease his activities and leave the country she and her family would be killed. These events, in addition to previous threats he had received, forced the Gonzalez families to flee to the U.S. The LDN stepped in when Reynaldo Gonzalez paid a visit to Guatemala in mid-June. We rushed letters to President Arzu and the Defense Ministry to insist that he be safeguarded while there, and elicited a curt press statement from the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington. Mr. Gonzalez recently returned, unharmed, to the U.S.

• In El Salvador, the newspaper El Diario de Hoy, which during the civil war published names of alleged terrorists who soon wound up the victims of death squads, printed on June 6 an outrageous article claiming (with no evidence) that a number of major unions were planning a "terrorist" campaign against the government's rapid privatization program. The newspaper said that kidnappings, office takeovers, and attacks on foreign executives were being planned. The following day the newspaper quoted the Vice-Minister of Public Security, who appeared to lend credibility to the conspiracy charges. Because of the previous role of El Diario de Hoy, the articles are taken as serious threats by those named in them. LDN members wrote to President Calderon Sol, the Minister of Public Security, the head of the telephone company (the most controversial privatization target), and the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador to protest the threatening charges.

Labor Defense Network
1470 Irving Street, NW, Washington, DC 20010
Name __________________________
Address _________________________
City ___________________________
State ________ Zip______________
Please check one box below:

o Enclosed is $50 for 12 messages

o Enclosed is $25 for 6 messages

o Please bill me $6 for each message sent.

. . . and, please check one of the following:

o Please use my name not more than once per month.

o Please use my name not more than once every two months.

Thank You!!

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