Sweatshop controversy in Nicaragua becomes rallying point for activists
By Filadelfo Aleman/AP
Contending that her bosses treated her like a slave, a young seamstress joined a four-day strike last summer to demand better pay and working conditions at a factory that sews blue jeans for the U.S. military. Today, Johana Auxiliadora Reyes and her husband are unemployed — blacklisted, she claims, by the Taiwanese plant, one of 48 foreign firms that hires tens of thousands of Nicaraguans to work in factories in the country’s free-trade zone.
No matter how bad the job was, Reyes says making $62 a month sewing pockets onto jeans was better than nothing. “We’re unemployed, and nobody will give us work,” said Reyes, one of 400 of the factory’s 2,000 workers fired in August after the strike.
Such sentiments aren’t surprising in the small Central American nation where unemployment runs at 60 percent and foreign-owned garment makers bring sorely needed jobs.
What’s unusual is that the Chentex strike, with the subsequent firings, has become a symbol of globalization’s downside, casting a harsh light on the extraordinary power of foreign factories, and mobilizing sweatshop opponents as far away as Wisconsin.
Activists in the United States have sued a U.S. unit of the Chentex factory, owned by Taiwan’s Nien Hsing business consortium. The case in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles accuses Chentex of unfairly shutting out unions, paying low wages and maintaining poor working conditions.
Workers also complained about poor ventilation, hot working conditions, limited bathroom breaks and even physical abuse, said Daisy Pitkin of the Campaign for Labor Rights, a Washington-based anti-sweatshop group.
Activists have demonstrated against Kohl’s department stores in Milwaukee, one of several large retail chains that sells jeans from the factory for $30 — half a month’s pay for the workers who sew them. Chentex workers were seeking raises of up to 50 percent.
The spotlight puts the United States, which has enacted laws linking trade privileges to labor conditions, in the uncomfortable position of defending an accused sweatshop, one that supplies its armed forces with jeans sold in stores on military bases nationwide.
U.S. officials say they found no evidence of abuse or poor working conditions when a delegation visited the Chentex plant. “We went down there, checked it out, and we saw that things were up to par,” said Capt. Eric Hilliard, spokesman for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service.
However, the General Accounting Office, the congressional arm that oversees federal spending, plans to look into the allegations at the request of members of Congress, a GAO spokeswoman said last week.
Chentex denied the accusations, saying that the factory treats workers fairly and that it paid each fired worker a month’s salary for each year worked at the plant, as required by law. Workers were fired for encouraging other workers to hold violent protests, not for striking, said plant manager Carlos Yin.
“The accusations of mistreatment are false,” he said.
Nicaragua’s government backs that position and went so far as to bar an American activist from entering the country in 1999 after he criticized the plant. The American was accused of fomenting labor unrest and of meddling in Nicaragua’s domestic affairs.
Nicaragua’s “maquiladoras” — assembly-for-export factories — pay workers nearly $60 million a year in salaries, directly generating 40,000 jobs, mostly to single mothers, says Gilberto Wong, director of the Free-Trade Zone Corp. in the maquiladora area.
But some say Chentex wields too much sway.
Pedro Ortega, a Nicaraguan union leader who asked American activists to file the lawsuit, says Chentex threatened to cancel plans for a second plant if Nicaragua insisted that it rehire the workers laid off in August. Chentex denies any such threat.
More broadly, a confrontation with the factory could put Nicaragua at odds with a powerful foreign benefactor. Since 1992, Taiwan has given more than $180 million in aid to Central America — including $14 million to build Nicaragua’s presidential palace and its foreign ministry. Central America, for its part, is a rare stronghold of support for Taiwan in its efforts to resist mainland China’s attempts to strip the island of international recognition.
Wong accused the lawsuit’s supporters of trying to recover U.S. factories that have shut down in favor of plants south of the border with cheaper labor.
“To compare the salaries in this country with those in the United States is an aberration,” said Wong, the Nicaraguan president’s former spokesman.
“Nobody denies that a U.S. worker makes much more than a worker in Nicaragua ... The jobs and salaries at the maquiladoras aren’t the best, but they help solve the unemployment problem.” |
