INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES KERNAGHAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL LABOR COMMITTEE, NEW YORK
(Corporate Crime Reporter - 12 August 1996)
Most Americans probably know Kathie Lee Gifford when they see her. Kathie Lee is everywhere - on her daily TV talk show, in TV ads for cruise ships, singing the national anthem at sporting events.
But who can name the activist who forced Kathie Lee, The GAP, Inc., and Liz Claiborne to the table to negotiate the rights of the young workers who make GAP jeans, Liz Claiborne sweaters, and Kathie Lee pants?
His name is Charles Kernaghan, and he is the executive director of the National Labor Committee in New York City.
During the past three years, the National Labor Committee, an activist group with a $250,000 a year budget and a staff of three, has:
- shut down 87 maquiladora operations in Haiti;
- forced The GAP to sign an agreement to allow for independent monitoring of its contractor plants producing clothing for the GAP;
- won passage of a federal law conditioning every penny of U.S. foreign assistance on respect for worker rights;
- and stopped the use of U.S. tax dollars to build offshore sweatshops.
Kernaghan's next target - Walt Disney and its contractors in Haiti, which produce Pocahontas, Mickey Mouse, and Lion King children's clothing.
Before joining the National Labor Committee in 1990, Kernaghan was a graduate-student in psychology, a photographer, a cab driver, and a construction worker.
We interviewed Kernaghan on August 5, 1996.
CCR: How did you become involved with the National Labor Committee?
KERNAGHAN: In 1985, I went to Central America to photograph an international peace march. It was an effort to get some Americans and Europeans down there so people wouldn't be killed or harassed on the peace march. Our role was to provide protection. While I was down there, I was assigned to a trade unionist who was receiving death threats. I don't speak a word of Spanish, but there was a translator. I spent so much time with this man that I learned much about his union. I learned about children who were thrown in prison because their parents were union leaders.
When I came back, I had no contacts here whatsoever. When I got back to my apartment, I started to write about my experiences. I started sending these writings to family members, friends - anybody. That was the beginning of my organizing.
I wanted to start pounding people with stories, photos, writings about what was really going on in Central America - the human rights violations, the union-busting.
I believed what Noam Chomsky had said - that there were only two institutions left in our society that had the resources to impact our society - the labor unions and the religious organizations.
So, I made a conscious decision to work within the labor movement. It wasn't as if I started out in the labor movement. This was started in an idiosyncratic manner. And then conscious decisions were made as to which direction to take it in.
The National Labor Committee was founded in 1980 primarily by Reverend David Dyson. He was a long-time activist. He has been around. He was a real master. We still work closely together now. He has gone back to run a church in Brooklyn.
He started the committee in 1980, along with several union presidents - Jack Shainkman, president of the American Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), William Wimpinsinger, president of the International Association of Machinists, and Doug Fraser, president of the United Auto Workers.
CCR: They funded the National Labor Committee?
KERNAGHAN: No. It wasn't even funded. Dyson worked for ACTWU. He got these three union presidents together and they said that we needed to have a different approach to Central America and the Caribbean. Of course, in 1980, Central America was on the front pages of the newspapers.
The National Labor Committee launched the first democratic debate within the AFL-CIO on the issue of international affairs.
CCR: It was basically a letterhead organization?
KERNAGHAN: It was more than that. There was a little bit of funding involved, but not much. There were union staff people working on this project. At one point, there were upward of two dozen local chapters of the National Labor Committee all across the country. So, this debate at the National Labor Committee opened up a debate within the rank and file all across the country.
This was a moment where rank and file people and local union presidents for the first time could enter the debate around foreign policy.
So, in some ways it was a letterhead committee, but in other ways, it represented a profound opening within the AFL-CIO.
The committee did grassroots, hands-on human rights work. People went to Central America and got trade union leaders out of prison. The Committee acted as a hands-on, human rights organization focused on protecting trade unionists who were being slaughtered all across Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras.
When the peace accords were signed in El Salvador in 1990, we had a choice. From 1980 to 1990, the Committee had saved lives in Central America. We could have let it go at that. We decided to continue to protect worker rights. We were able to turn away from the wars, and turn toward corporate behavior.
We focused on Central America and the Caribbean because that is where we had experience and contrats. We had built an enormous solidarity movement all across the United States. This was a solidarity network that was built up over ten years.
When we turned to look at the corporations and worker rights in 1990, we were in a very good position, despite the fact that we had no money and that we had a small organization.
CCR: Give us some examples of your work on corporations since 1990.
KERNAGHAN: The first project focused the United States' funding free trade zones and industrial zones across Central and South America. The Reagan Administration was adamant about giving U.S. companies access to low wages. The Reagan Administration saw that Central America and the Caribbean could be developed as a low wage manufacturing haven for U.S. companies. And they set about it ruthlessly. They called it the Caribbean Basin Initiative.
The administration said "we are sick of providing welfare to third world countries - we have to cut the welfare dependency of these third world countries". They decided to develop the private sector in the third world countries. When the private sector gets up and running, it will be the engine of economic growth. People will have jobs, and once they have jobs, they will elect, with their money, what health care and education they want. That was the argument.
So, the Reagan and Bush administration actually started slashing health care and education funding for Central America and the Caribbean, as they poured money into the private sector.
This was a tremendous change. The U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) virtually changed its mandate to propping up the private sector and oligarchs all across the region.
We discovered that one of the biggest components of this drive was the maquiladora export sector. Here was AID shifting its mandate away from education, health, and the environment and into export production in Central America and the Caribbean.
We were able to trace well over $1 billion spent by the Reagan and Bush Administrations to develop free trade zones for export to North America. If you were a U.S. company willing to go to these free trade zones, the U.S. government paid 75 percent of corporate travel expenses just to go look at the free trade zones. They paid 50 percent of your worker training. They paid 75 percent of your technical needs. They subsidized low interest loans - you could get loans at two percent below the prime rate. They made it such a deal to leave the country and go offshore that today there are 500,000 mostly young women in Central America and the Caribbean producing exclusively for the United States.
This was planned and crafted by the Reagan and Bush administrations, and subsidized by the U.S. government. Ads were taken out in U.S. business journals advertising the low wages available in Central America. One ad read: "Rosa Martinez will sew for you in El Salvador - you can hire her at 56 cents an hour". The ad was paid for with U.S. taxpayer money.
CCR: How did you do this research?
KERNAGHAN: AID had privatized itself, so that all of its documents were under the control of a group of workers earning minimum wages in northern Virginia. When we went in to get these documents, the workers couldn't care less that we were taking out documents, as long as we paid for the copies. AID never knew it was being investigated. I must have taken 40 or 50 feet of documents out of AID. I read more of this material than AID read. After we did the research, we formed a phony company, got a phony mailing address, a phony phone number, a phony fax number, made up phony business cards - the whole works. We penetrated deeply into the government, and we did it with CBS' Sixty Minutes. We met with government people, we went offshore.
The National Labor Committee, after all of these years of tremendous obscurity, all of a sudden in 1992 during the presidential election, emerged with a program on Sixty Minutes. The point of the program was that the Bush administration was sending jobs offshore, using U.S. taxpayer money, and that worker and human rights were being violated in these free trade zones. They were using computers to blacklist religious or labor organizers.
The issue got immense visibility from Sixty Minutes, Nightline, Donahue, 100 newspapers around the country and radio talk shows. In 1992, Clinton pollsters told us that their tracking polls showed that this issue - the export of jobs - became the number one issue in the country in two critical weeks in October.
That was our first big hit. It was so successful that we were able to change the laws of AID within six days of the release of that television program and the release of our report. The law was changed so that AID could never again spend a single penny of taxpayers money to provide incentives to induce companies to leave the United States. And what was more important for us, AID and all U.S. foreign aid programs are now conditioned on respect for worker rights. If worker rights are being violated in any project which the U.S. government is funding, that funding has to be cut within 30 days until the worker rights situations is improved.
The Clinton-Gore team used this issue to their advantage in 1992.
CCR: But once elected, they became the biggest exporters of jobs.
KERNAGHAN: Exactly. During the campaign, I was getting phone calls from their staff. They wanted to know if I could give them a plant closing where they could go and set up an event for either Clinton or Gore. Before the election, I got many phone calls a day from the campaign. After they were elected, the phones stopped ringing. But I expected that. For us, they were a vehicle for the issue.
After that successful campaign on AID, in early 1993, we were asked by Haitian President Aristide to meet with him. He was living in the U.S. in exile at the time. He wanted a labor delegation to go to Haiti.
This was at the time after the coup. There was murder and bloodshed and torture in Haiti. He wanted us to get involved in the issue of human rights in Haiti.
The Organization of American States (OAS) put an embargo on Haiti, supposedly to pressure the Haitian military to get out of the way, and allow President Aristide to return. But the Bush administration inserted a loophole into the OAS embargo so that all U.S. companies could continue to operate. Everybody else agreed to the embargo, except for the United States.
The United States allowed all of the maquiladora companies to continue to either produce directly in Haiti or contract out the work. So, during the embargo, the U.S. trade with Haiti actually increased. Tens of millions of dollars of maquiladora goods were coming into the United States, duty free, during the OAS embargo.
In 1993, we took a labor delegation to Haiti and exposed the situation. We visited the factories, we talked with the workers, and we put together a report.
Phil Donahue did a program on Haiti with Susan Sarandon, Jonathan Demme and some other actors. They used our material and exploded this issue - U.S. companies were paying 14 cents an hour in wages in Haiti, under military repression, where unions had been destroyed. The work hours were lengthened and the pay was slashed.
We fought this out in the media for several months and we won. We shut down these plants in Haiti. By that time the Clinton administration was in. And under this tremendous pressure, the Clinton administration closed the loophole, so that the U.S. would have to obey the OAS embargo until the return of democracy and the elected government.
CCR: You accomplished a lot with a small group.
KERNAGHAN: At this point, the National Labor Committee has three staff people - myself, Barbara Briggs and David Cook.
We have a cash budget that is up to about $250,000 from small foundations. Seventy percent of our budget comes from a group of small foundations. The big foundations still won't touch us. We get money from the Arca Foundation in Washington, D.C., the Veatch Foundation on Long Island, the New World Foundation and the General Services Fund in Colorado. The unions give us about 30 percent of our budget.
CCR: So, the Haiti project got the National Labor Committee deeper into the issue of sweatshops. You then returned to Central America.
KERNAGHAN: Yes. The first time we went to Central America in 1990 with our phony companies, we taped all the U.S. executives and U.S. government officials telling us about computerized blacklists of union and religious activists. They spilled their guts to us - "we never have to worry about unions, we blacklist people, fire them". That ran on Sixty Minutes.
The second time we went down, to film Zoned for Slavery, every government and corporate official hated our guts and no one would speak to us. So this time, when we went down, we decided on a different tactic. We went down dressed in suits and ties, carrying the video cameras on our shoulders. At a free trade zone in Honduras, the armed guards got so confused. They looked at us in these ties and jackets and figured "these gringos with the ties and jackets must own the place", so they let us in to the free trade zone. We walked right in.
We saw a door that said "employees only". We walked right in. And the guard in that factory figured, "they're in here, they must own it". We spent fifteen minutes filming on the shop floor. Management caught us and they went nuts. But we got to interview fourteen-year-old children at their sewing machines, and the children talked to us. I would ask what their hours were and they would say "7:30 in the morning until 8:30 at night".
Everyday? "Yes, everyday". On Saturday? "Yes, we work until 4:30 on Saturday". Do they yell at you ? "Yes, they scream at us". Do they ever hit you? "Yes, they punch us. It's miserable".
So, we based our film around our getting into the factory. Plus, we found young children - 12, 13, 14, 15-year-olds - who couldn't finish their production schedules at the factory, and they were forced to take their work home with them. They were making Liz Clairborne sweaters. Liz Clairborne is the largest women's apparel company in the world. They are very hip, very progressive, very liberal, and here we had 13 and 14-year olds knitting Liz Clairborne sweaters at home after they had worked a ten-hour day because they couldn't finish their production quota. And we filmed it.
At the time, I didn't know who Liz Clairborne was. It didn't strike me as a big deal.
So, we made the film. And we based it on this little girl, Leslie Rodriguez, who was working there. We filmed the factories, we followed her home and to work.
When we got back to the United States, I got a call from the staff of Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-Ohio). He was holding hearings on child labor on September 21, 1994. He asked us to come to the hearings. I said sure, as long as we can mention companies and labels. He agreed.
We came and testified at those hearings. We showed a five-minute excerpt of our film. We brought the 14-year old Leslie Rodriguez from Honduras to testify. There were media there. ABC World News Tonight used our video and testimony and put Liz Clairborne's name right across the screen of the television. That is a nightmare for any corporation - to have their name associated in such a prominent fashion with child labor.
That led to two remarkable things. Liz Clairborne said they were going to research the issue, and if it proved true, they were going to pull out. We said, "If you pull out, we are going to continue the campaign". I met with the president and CEO of Liz Claiborne. We worked out a deal in 1994 where Liz Claiborne would not pull out of Honduras. Under the deal, they would return to Honduras and clean up the factory. A vice president of the company went down with me to a factory and met face to face with the workers. That had never happened before.
We ended up having forty maquiladora women meet face to face with an executive vice president of Liz Claiborne. He couldn't escape. For two or three hours, the vice president had to sit there and listen to these women. It was very powerful for him.
The real issue at that facility was forced overtime. When big orders came in, they worked from 7:30 in the morning to late at night. They worked weekends. And then the humiliations - the bathrooms were locked. They don't want kids getting up and going back and forth to the bathrooms. They need permission to go to the bathroom. They search the kids so that they don't bring in candy to stain the fabric. It's real scary, demeaning stuff. Screaming at the workers, calling them chikenheads, shitheads, whores, animals, throwing garments in their faces if they are not working fast enough.
The agreement with the company was to change all of this. Once you catch a company in violations, the company's initial self-righteous response is to say "we're going to leave."
We said to Liz Clairborne, "That's bull - cutting and running is no answer. The only answer is to stay put and clean up that factory."
CCR: How has Liz Claiborne done since the agreement?
KERNAGHAN: Fairly good. We're still working with them now. This is the first time a company the size of Liz Claiborne was driven back into a country and into a factory they said they were going to pull out of.
CCR: How do you know things are getting better there?
KERNAGHAN: We are constantly talking with the workers inside and out. We have good contacts on the ground.
Also, at that time, GATT enabling legislation was in front of Congress. As part of the GATT legislation the maquiladora companies in Central America and the Caribbean were to receive from the Clinton administration $160 million a year in tariff breaks. Clinton wanted to give these companies 100 percent duty free access to the U.S. Under the legislation, their products could enter the U.S. 100 percent duty free.
Senator Metzenbaum sent our video to the White House. It was seen by some cabinet people, and that next day, the tariff break was cut out of the GATT bill.
This was a hammer blow to the companies.
CCR: Your next target was the GAP in 1995.
KERNAGHAN: We started out in January 1995. The GAP, another progressive, liberal company had a corporate code of conduct. We said that the GAP code of conduct was not being implemented. They were getting goods from a plant called Mandarin International in El Salvador. It was one of the factories that was built with a low interest rate loan from AID. It was run by a former Salvadoran army colonel. It was a nasty place. Children couldn't go to night school because of the forced overtime. They were working late into the night. They were put out into the sun if they weren't working hard enough or hit with screwdrivers in the head. Bathrooms were locked. When the women tried to organize, 350 people were fired.
The GAP came back to us and said it never happened. They said it was a wonderful factory. So, we ended up head-to-head in a fight with this giant retailer. And the GAP stupidly went to El Salvador to conduct its own investigation. The GAP sent the executive vice president of the company with some staff people to the factory to talk with the workers.
Imagine the GAP VP walking into the factory. Some teenagers look up from their sewing machines. He asked a question in front of the boss of the factory, and the kids all said, "fine, it's great, we love it, it's terrific, we need these jobs". They then go and talk with the minister of labor of the government, and the minister says "everything's fine, it's a terrific factory - don't believe anything these activists are telling you".
And the GAP, based on this information, decided to fight us. And we blew them out of the water. They did not know that we were meeting with hundreds of these workers. They did not know that we were dealing with the human rights groups in El Salvador who documented the human rights violations in that factory. We were dealing with the human rights representative for the government of El Salvador who was documenting these violations. They didn't know that we were there with a New York Times reporter and with Dateline NBC. We toured workers from the plant throughout the U.S.
We ran a campaign on human rights, and the company pulled out and left the workers without work. So, we had to drive the GAP back into El Salvador. We had to get the workers reinstated. And we came up with this idea of independent monitoring.
This meant that the local human rights and religious organizations in El Salvador would have access to the factory and to the workers to guarantee that basic human rights and worker rights would be respected. And we won.
By the time we finished this thing, we had defeated the GAP.
On December 15, 1995 we signed an agreement with the GAP which now sets the benchmark for this kind of corporate action offshore.
CCR: Who are the monitors?
KERNAGHAN: The monitors are the human rights; departments of the Jesuit University and the Catholic Archdiocese, and CENTRA, which is a labor research center. So, we have three of the most prestigious organizations in El Salvador monitoring the factory. These are organizations that can't be threatened by the government of El Salvador and the U.S. embassy.
Up until the GAP agreement, the companies had their phony codes of conduct and they monitored themselves, which was laughable. This meant that the company's offshore operations were run behind closed doors.
With this agreement, we smashed those doors down. The old boys network was smashed. The doors were opened. The public is now going to get a little bit of insight into what goes on in these factories.
And that's why the other companies and the National Retail Federation fought so hard against independent monitoring - it will end this old boys network where everything went on behind closed doors and you could just bullshit the U.S. consumer with these phony codes of conduct.
CCR: How did you force the GAP to the table?
KERNAGHAN: We brought two workers to the United States - one from Honduras and one from El Salvador. We were able to prove that if you bring the workers - not the fat union leaders - if you bring the workers to speak with the people of the United States, you will always win.
We went with these two kids in the summer of 1995 around the country. We held press conferences in front of GAP stores. And we dominated a lot of media. I know the press is anti-labor, but they could not ignore this tour. By the time we finished this tour, we had articles in every major newspaper in every city we went to. Bob Herbert in the New York Times wrote six articles on the GAP campaign.
And with the tour, we created GAP organizing committees all across the country. By the time we got back to New York, we had organizations in twenty different cities. That threatened the GAP more than anything else.
In December 1995, after the GAP victory, I got a call from Labor Secretary Robert Reich. I thought somebody was pulling my leg. This guy gets on the phone at 8 o'clock at night and he stans congratulating me, saying how unprecedented this is, and how it sets a new slandard for human rights. It reached a new level.
CCR: How did you get onto the Kathie Lee Gifford case?
KERNAGHAN: This just fell onto our lap. In October 1995, we were in Honduras looking at other GAP contractors when we ran across a factory called Global Fashion. We had a meeting with the workers. They were children. They handed us Kathie Lee labels. And they also handed us the tags which were applied to the garments. The tags had the face of Kathie Lee and it said "a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this garment will go to various children's charities".
When we came back to New York, we continued the research. The Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras would bring workers into their office and we would talk to the workers from our offices in New York. We could do research from New York over the phone. Through this method, we kept tracking this factory even after returning to the United States.
We found out that at this factory the kids were searched on their way in, couldn't go to night school because of the work, worked long hours, were screamed at, suffered physical punishment - the same scenario.
We found out that for each Kathie Lee pants, the workers were only paid 25 cents. And the pants were selling at Wal-Mart in the U.S. for $19.96.
So, here you had Kathie Lee Gifford, spokeswoman for children's causes, singing national anthems at Super Bowls. Here you had the largest retailer in the world, Wal-Mart, with its code of conduct. And in Honduras, an hour and a half from Miami, are children working to produce Kathie Lee clothing for Wal-Mart. It was the perfect example that the system was out of control.
CCR: How did you break the story to the public?
KERNAGHAN: We testified before a House Committee hearing in April 1996. We were getting ready for a big campaign. Two days aher the hearing, Kathie Lee Gifford began crying on her television show and started attacking me. She went on for eight or nine minutes. She saw herself as the victim. She said I was only after publicity. She threatened me with a lawsuit.
But it became a national issue.
CCR: Did the reporters cover the testimony?
KERNAGHAN: There were reporters, but they were there because the child from Canada who had launched a campaign against child labor was testifying. Everybody was there to cover what he said. One person from the Los Angeles Times wrote something about what we said about Kathie Lee. And Gifford saw it and then exploded on her television show.
From that moment forward, it has been non-stop press calls. There was a media frenzy. On her TV show, she kept attacking. Wal-Mart came out and said it was an underhanded plot by the National Labor Committee to defame them during sweeps week.
The second day, she went on her program and said I was a paid lobbyist.
CCR: For whom?
KERNAGHAN: Regis, her co-host, asked, "for whom?" And she said, "I won't tell you. Let the press do their work". So, the press called me and I trotted out our financial records. And I said, "If I'm a paid lobbyist, I'm the most poorly paid lobbyist in the history of the world". And I invited them to my apartment on the lower east side. They declined.
She went on PrimeTime Live to deny the charges. I told the PrimeTime Live people before the interview that we were going to bring a child from Honduras to prove the allegations. They asked her about this, and she was shaken by the thought of a child coming up from Honduras. I knew at the time that there was a sweatshop in New York City making Kathie Lee clothes. And that story blew in the newspapers the day after her denial on PrimeTime Live. The story was that Kathie Lee clothes were being made 30 blocks from her studio in a sweatshop where workers hadn't been paid.
After that revelation, we brought the child worker from Honduras. We did a press conference with Congressman George Miller (D-California). The thing had enormous life.
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