ACTIVISTS REJECT SWEATSHOP SUMMIT CALL FOR CORPORATE MONITORS.
GROUP TOURS INDONESIAN NIKE WORKER
(Corporate Crime Reporter, 22 July 1996)
"Independent monitors" was the central topic of conversation at the Labor Department-sponsored conference on sweatshops last week. But one person's "independent monitor" is another's fox guarding the chicken coop.
Corporate representatives at the meeting - including represcntatives of Wal-Mart, Kmart, J.C. Penny, Nordstrom, The Limited, Nike, Inc., and Liz Claiborne, Inc. - floated the idea that accounting firms like Ernst & Young or private detective agencies like Kroll Associates could do the monitoring.
But activists, such as the National Labor Committee's Charles Kernaghan, the man who transformed Kathie Lee Gifford from a talking TV hostess to a walking human rights activist, said that corporate-sponsored monitors "couldn't be trusted."
Under public pressure generated by the National Labor Committee, the GAP earlier this year agreed to allow Jesuit organizations in Honduras to monitor working conditions in factories where GAP clothing is made.
"A walk through the sweatshop floor by an accounting firm is out of the question," Kernaghan said. "They can set up any phony operation they want, but it will not change things unless the workers trust the monitor."
Labor Department representatives last week barred activists, including Jeffrey Ballinger of Press for Change, from attending the sweatshop summit.
Ballinger recently released an extensive report detailing the history of abuses by Nike, Inc.'s Indonesian contractors, which included "management by terror, forced overtime, minimum wage violations, and illegal training wages."
Ballinger claims that Nike's "Code of Conduct" and "Memorandum of Understanding," which were intended to rectify the abusive conditions, have been little more than a charade as a result of Nike's lackadaisical monitoring of contractors.
Ballinger and Medea Benjamin of the San Francisco-based Global Exchange, are touring the country with an Indonesia worker, Cicih Sukacsih, who claims she was unjustly dismissed forrn a Nike factory in 1992, along with 23 others, for attempting to seek better working conditions and liveable wages. Her case is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court of Indonesia.
Benjamin said that the tour "will launch a national campaign to get Nike to agree to independent monitoring of its Indonesian factories, to settle claims by workers who have been unfairly dismissed, and to improve wages and working conditions."
The recent press attention on Kathie Lee Gifford - who has been publicly chastised for profiting at the expense of underpaid and underage Haitian workers who produce her Wal-Mart clothing line - has spilled over to the Nike campaign. A demonstration outside of a Footlocker shoe store in downtown Washington, D.C. Iast week drew a crush of reporters.
Ballinger and Benjamin said that the only way to stop the abuses in the factories is to have independent monitoring by Indonesian human rights groups. "If Nike has nothing to hide," Benjamin said, "they should be happy to accept such monitoring."
Ballinger said that he, Benjamin and Sukaesih asked weeks ago to appear at Reich's summit at Marymount University in northern Virginia, but that Labor Department officials never returned their calls.
"We went out there uninvited in the morning and were told to leave the campus, that we weren't invited," Ballinger said. "We were shown the door."
Nike did not return calls seeking comment.
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