04 June 2008
Efforts Grow to Give Garment Workers a Fair Deal
Some U.S. firms’ cotton shirts come with promise of fairer labor practices
Washington -- The sale of shirts and caps emblazoned with college logos generated $1.23 billion at colleges during the 2006-2007 academic year, according to the National Association of College Stores. Joe Falcone's company makes only a fraction of that. But it stands out for another reason -- it is one of very few companies to sell "fair-trade apparel."
The company, called Counter Sourcing Inc., was founded in 2005 to provide colleges with clothing made in factories that treat their workers better than most. The garment industry, based in developing countries in Asia and elsewhere, is notorious for rock-bottom wages, forced unpaid overtime work and other abuses.
Fair trade, as a labor practice and marketing strategy, is better known in a few agricultural commodities, like coffee, tea and cocoa. In 2007, an estimated $837 million of fair-trade-certified coffee was sold in the United States, accounting for 3.8 percent of all coffee sold in the country.
Although several nonprofit groups -- like Ten Thousand Villages -- have imported handmade fair-trade clothing for decades, Falcone heads one of only a handful of for-profit businesses established to do the same with manufactured garments.
Falcone, 39, once worked for Nike Inc., overseeing the athletic shoe giant's compliance with labor standards in Southeast Asia. He told America.gov that 17 percent of his own company's revenues are returned to the factory workers who make the garments. His company, he said, "allows consumers to know where the money goes and have an influence over it."
Falcone supplies garments to 13 major U.S. colleges, including Duke University and the University of Wisconsin. In January, after two years of operations, his company achieved its first $100,000 in sales. Falcone said 10 percent, or $10,000, was divided among the 2,700 workers at the one factory it buys from, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The result was a modest, one-off bonus of $3.70 above workers’ $25 monthly wage. A further 7 percent of revenues, $7,000, will be spent on health training or a similar activity to be chosen by the workers, Falcone said.
Falcone and other fair-trade apparel merchants say they are able to compete with conventional garment companies mainly by cutting out middlemen and dealing directly with a few producers. Bill Bass, co-founder of Fair Indigo, a larger fair-trade apparel company also established in 2005, said that finding factories with better wages and working conditions has been "by far the hardest thing" in building up the business.
Scott Nova, director of the Worker Rights Consortium, established by a group of universities and student activists to monitor conditions for workers in developing countries, said he views the establishment of fair-trade clothing companies as positive. But, like other activists, he is concerned about the lack of agreed standards, which exist for some agricultural commodities. He said fair-trade apparel can mean different things to different people, and anyone can claim to be selling it.
Fair Indigo, for example, says it closely monitors the 27 factories in six countries that produce its clothing, and it requires them to pay workers at a rate that is twice the minimum wage. But while some American apparel companies publish the results on the factories they monitor, Fair Indigo does not. Marsha Dickson, chair of the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies at the University of Delaware, said the lack of "independent and transparent monitoring" of the business of Fair Indigo and some other companies is "a disservice to fair trade."
TransFair USA, the nonprofit that licenses products to carry the "Fair Trade Certified" label on agricultural products, said it is looking into establishing standards for apparel.
Those involved with the issue believe it is more difficult to monitor conditions of workers who produce clothing than conditions of the farmers who grow coffee or tea, because there is a much longer supply chain in the garment industry. In the case of a cotton shirt, for example, different workers grow the cotton, gin it, spin the fiber into thread, weave the thread into cloth and cut and sew the garment.
Even without fair-trade certification, major clothing and athletic footwear companies in America have established their own monitoring systems over the last decade. The moves followed a number of embarrassing denouncements of major companies, including Nike, for buying merchandise from sweatshops that investigators said mistreated workers.
Today, Nike is seen by experts as a leader in moves to end the worst abuses.
Many garment workers in poor countries now work within "a framework of rights they've never had before," such as respect for minimum wages, no child labor and basic health and safety protections, said Auret van Heerden, president of the Fair Labor Association, which monitors the treatment of workers in factories that supply a number of American brands.
But he added that the competitive pressures to manufacture garments cheaply make enforcement of those standards very difficult.
