Pentagon Sweatshops
by Representative Sherrod Brown, 2001.01.31
“The Pentagon is making the American taxpayer an accomplice to a union-busting sweatshop.”
Last July, I went to Nicaragua and visited with a young woman named Cristina Sanchez. She lives in a crowded, rundown colonia called Tipitapa. Six miles outside Managua, Tipitapa is home to 100,000 generally destitute people densely packed into thirty-five square miles. The squalid landscape consists of house after house that has been patched up with packing materials taken from factories. Almost half of the workers in the Nicaraguan Free Trade Zone live here. Mostly young women, they work sixty-five hours a week for foreign-owned companies, and they earn only thirty or forty cents an hour. Sanchez worked for Chentex, a sweatshop owned by the Taiwanese company Nien Hsing, until she was fired for sympathizing with the union. The chief purchaser of Chentex clothing is none other than the Pentagon, according to Chentex documents obtained by Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which sells clothing at U.S. bases around the world, purchases up to 40 percent of the clothing produced in the sweatshop, the group says. Sanchez was getting paid twenty cents for every pair of jeans she produced. Americans buy them at Kohl’s and Wal-Mart for $25. Last May, the union representing Chentex workers asked the company for a raise of eight cents for each pair of jeans sewn. The company refused to negotiate. When the union announced a one-hour work stoppage, the company fired all eleven members of the union’s executive board, erected barbed wire on top of the walls surrounding the factory compound, brought in armed guards, and promised to break the union. Within a month, more than 300 workers–including Sanchez–had lost their jobs, and the company had filed a criminal suit against the union leaders.
Sanchez, twenty-one, tells me her story as she stands in the doorway of her one-room shack, holding her three-year-old daughter, Maria. The ends of the little girl’s hair are discolored, perhaps a sign of protein deficiency and malnutrition. Maria has seizures and suffers from diarrhea, an especially dangerous illness for an infant in a developing country. Sanchez still works in the free trade zone. Every day, just before sunrise, she joins dozens of other young women as they pile into a bright yellow school bus with Kent (Ohio) City School District emblazoned on the side. The destination of this bus is not an Ohio high school, but sweatshops with tight security and surveillance cameras.
There is palpable fear on Sanchez’s face as she tells me of life inside the Chentex factory gates plant managers yelling and screaming, the beatings, and workers’ constant worry about losing their jobs if they complained. Many of the workers took Sin Sueno, a kind of NoDoz with Vitamin B. If they refused to work overtime, they lost the pay they had earned that day. “They yelled at us, kicked us, hit us in the face or buttocks, and pulled our ears,” she says. “I’m telling you this because I lived it.”
The Pentagon is making the American taxpayer an accomplice to a union-busting sweatshop. The American people don’t support sweatshop labor. They don’t want to deny workers in other countries the same basic rights we enjoy in our country. But they give their tacit consent if we don’t fulfill our responsibility to inform every American of what our military is supporting in our name.
After I sent a letter to President Clinton signed by sixty-eight House members requesting an investigation of the labor dispute, U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky warned Nicaragua it stands to lose some trade benefits if it doesn’t move to ensure that Chentex complies with local labor laws. However, Fred Bluhm, a spokesperson for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, said that Pentagon representatives traveled to Nicaragua to examine the Chentex operation and “found no problems.”
I have joined with Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, a member of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, in requesting that the General Accounting Office investigate the Pentagon’s role in this sweatshop. We will not sit quietly by as members of the Army and Air Force support sweatshops in Nicaragua. The Pentagon must use its weight to demand that the Chentex management resolve the labor dispute and respect workers’ rights.
Closed Down in Burma
Within hours of a press conference by Representative Cynthia McKinney and the National Labor Committee, the Pentagon announced on December 21 that the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which runs 1,400 stores at military installations around the world, will no longer import clothing from Burma. According to The New York Times, the AAFES “had imported $138,290 in clothing from Myanmar despite a ban by the Clinton Administration on investing in that country.”McKinney, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, had just announced that she and fourteen of her colleagues were asking the Government Accounting Office to investigate the Pentagon’s ties to Burmese sweatshops.
“Last week, President Clinton awarded the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award, to Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s Nobel Prizewinning advocate for democracy,” McKinney said on December 21. “At that very moment, she was being held under house arrest by a brutal military regime that has earned worldwide condemnation for repression and the use of forced labor. Yet, the U.S. military has decided to support this oppressive regime, and undermine the efforts of President Clinton and human rights groups worldwide. I cannot understand what the Pentagon must be thinking. The fact that our Department of Defense is propping up one of the most oppressive military regimes in the world is ludicrous,” she said. When the Pentagon reversed course, McKinney applauded. “I commend the Pentagon for doing the right thing and pulling out of Burma,” she said. “I hope this is only the first step in transforming the Army and Air Force Exchange Service into a sustainable organization that promotes American values abroad.”
The Burma ties were “too embarrassing,” says Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee. The Clinton Administration had little choice to but to give in, he says. The success on the Burma front gives Kernaghan hope. He notes that the Army and Air Force Exchange Service is “larger than Kohl’s” in its clothing sales. “If we can drag them out of the mud, we can have a huge impact on the industry,” he says. “Right now, they’re down at the bottom with Wal-Mart.”
For more information on Pentagon sweatshops in Nicaragua and Burma, contact the National Labor Committee at (212) 242-3002, or visit its web site at Two Faces of the U.S. Government
Editor’s Note: On December 15, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney joined Congressman Sherrod Brown and the National Labor Committee in denouncing the Pentagon’s involvement with the Chentex sweatshop in Nicaragua, which has fired employees for their union activity. What follows is an abridged version of her statement at that press conference.
The plight of the workers in the Chentex factory is not an isolated incident. This is happening all over the world. What kind of message is the U.S. sending to developing nations in our trade strategy? On the one hand, Charlene Barshefsky asked Nicaragua to clean up its act and respect the rights of the workers in the Chentex factory. On the other hand, the U.S. military is one of the largest purchasers from that very same factory. So now we have the U.S. Trade Representative saying one thing, and the Pentagon doing another. The U.S. speaks then with forked tongue, and the lives of the poor workers do not improve. It must make the U.S. look like a hypocrite if we talk about human rights, worker rights, and then have the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) buy millions of dollars of goods from Chentex. The message sent is that not only does the U.S. government tolerate sweatshops; it supports sweatshops. I was not surprised when I learned about the two faces of the U.S. government. How could I be when I see the human rights legacy of the Clinton Administration to the oppressed and indigenous peoples of the world: decreased emphasis on human rights, increased U.S. corporate global penetration, more wretchedness for the already wretched of the Earth, a loss of America’s moral soul. We call upon AAFES to respect and follow its own core values: integrity, trust, accountability, and compassion. I ask AAFES to exercise its conscience, to say that slave labor, sweatshop labor, child labor are abhorrent practices that run counter to everything that we as a nation stand for. The combination of the pitifully low Chentex wage and the paltry amount being asked for by the workers is terrible but illustrative of our point. The Pentagon is willing to spend $500 for a hammer, $60 billion on the Star Wars program, and another $60 billion for deployment of that system, which doesn’t work. This same military tells us they can’t spare another eight cents more for a pair of jeans. It seems these companies react to unions like slaveholders reacted to slave revolts, but time is not on the companies’ side. These conditions are not sustainable, and the people will fight back, and when they do, they’ll have the support of people like us. If these companies aren’t careful, “Workers of the World, Unite” won’t be just a hackneyed, out-of-date slogan. It’ll mean survival for people of conscience and for the wretched of the Earth.
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, Democrat from Georgia, is a member of the Home Armed Services Committee and is the ranking member on the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights of the House International Relation Committee
Ohio Democratic Congressman Sherrod Brown, the author of “Congress from the Inside” (Kent State, 1999), is the ranking Democrat on the Commerce Committee’s Health and Environment Subcommittee and a member of the International Relations Committee.